Those $29 battery out-of-warranty replacements Apple promised are now available for impacted users with an iPhone 6 or later. The company was initially aiming for a late-January timeframe in the States when it first offered up the discount, following blowback against its admission that it had slowed down older model phones to maximize performance.
“We expected to need more time to be ready,” the company said in a statement offered up to TechCrunch this weekend, “but we are happy to offer our customers the lower pricing right away. Initial supplies of some replacement batteries may be limited.”
The spokeswoman disputed that, saying the company “definitely considered” snow and ice when creating its flagship store.
As for addressing the problem, Chwedyk said roping off areas are a good “stopgap” to make sure people don’t get hurt until design changes can be considered and possibly implemented.
Most pros I know want something that's quick and easy to setup up, a machine that performs well and is reliable, and is backed up by a solid company and warranty should issues arise. That typically been an iMac, but for those who have wanted a bit more power (or a lot more), enter the iMac Pro.
Well-written state laws against bad driving habits and federal guidelines about the design of in-car infotainment systems and personal electronics can send crucial signals about the dangers of these distractions. It’s unlikely that we’ll make the needed cultural shifts against these dangerous diversions if these behaviors remain legal and these ever-changing technologies remain unregulated. As more infotainment systems come to cars and our vehicles do more, but not all, of the driving for us, the temptation of distraction will only get worse in the near future.
Even before Trump, laws, guidelines, and devices weren’t keeping up. Now, even patchy progress may be undone by an administration dead set on deregulation and an industry hungry for our attention—even if it comes at the cost of its citizens’ and users’ lives.
But the rise of subscription-based streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix is changing that equation.
Without downloads to tether them, customers will find it easier to change devices and ecosystems. If customers start to believe that Apple is taking them for granted, or to the cleaners, the iPhone’s pre-eminence will not last much longer.
iFixit has never been particularly fond of Apple’s repair policies. The company’s gadgets regularly rack up poor repairability scores on the site. The site’s taking another jab at the tech giant today, dropping the price of its battery replacement kits to $29 — matching the cost of out-of-warranty battery replacements being offered up as consolation for its iPhone slowdown policies.
It's possible that a very old iPad with very poor battery health could have trouble dealing with spikes but, since Apple hasn't added them to the power management system, they'd shut down the same way iPhone 5s and previous iPhones would.
Could Apple add iPads to the same power management system?
Theoretically, but iPads have significantly bigger batteries than iPhones. That means they can better handle instantaneous performance peaks over a much, much longer portion of their battery life.
As the most valuable franchise in the world, Apple own more U.S. Treasury securities than many major countries, was the fourth-largest purchaser of solar power in 2016 as measured by megawatts, is the top retailer per square foot and even had a 140-acre wetland built in Oregon, in part to cool an Apple data center.
Then there's the massive supply chain. Apple's products are so intricate and require so many outside contributions that 36 publicly traded companies count on the iPhone maker for at least 10 percent of their revenue, according to FactSet.
First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that.
Our intention for iPhone is to deliver an experience that is simple and easy to use. Doing so requires a lot of engineering and many advanced technologies. One important technology area is battery and performance. Batteries are a complex technology, and there are a number of variables that contribute to battery performance and related iPhone performance. All rechargeable batteries are consumables and have a limited lifespan—eventually their capacity and performance decline so that they need to be serviced or recycled. As this happens, it can contribute to changes in iPhone performance. We created this information for those who would like to learn more.
The company said it would cut the price of an out-of-warranty battery replacement from $79 to $29 for an iPhone 6 or later, starting next month. The company also will update its iOS operating system to let users see whether their battery is in poor health and is affecting the phone’s performance.
[...]
At least eight lawsuits have been filed in California, New York and Illinois alleging that the company defrauded users by slowing devices down without warning them. The company also faces a legal complaint in France, where so-called “planned obsolesce” is against the law.
In this case, a little proactive communication could have gone a long way, and should be Apple’s big lesson here. If Apple had noted to individual iPhone users that their batteries were getting old — and that it could lead to reduced performance — this probably would have never been an issue.
A French activist group has launched a criminal lawsuit against Apple over its policy of slowing down older iPhones in a case that could see the tech giant 's executives jailed and cost it five percent of its income if convicted of the crime of "planned obsolescence".
This is an interesting design dilemma. The reason why Apple requires you to press the physical side button to confirm a purchase with Apple Pay or in the App Store is because pressing the side button can’t be faked by an app. [...]
But: people naturally expect everything they do on an iPhone to be done on screen. The screen is the phone — and that’s even more true with the iPhone X. Even with an animation pointing to the side button on screen, it doesn’t occur to people that they need to do something off-screen to authorize the transaction.
The edges of the roof slope down without any gutters to catch the melting snow. Pedestrians under the roof will get by sliding snow.
Since this store is a community hub, people are supposed to gather around the store and delight in their Apple products. But now they’ll get hit by falling icicles!
No, the real reason LTE Macs don’t exist is because the Mac basically has no built-in way to regulate how apps connect to the Internet. iOS was built from the ground up to differentiate between Wi-Fi and cellular data, which allows users on metered cellular plans to regulate how much data their devices use. Apps behave differently on Wi-Fi than on cellular.
A niche category of the expanding game market on iOS are board game translations. AppleInsider goes beyond Monopoly and Scrabble and looks into five of the best more advanced board games that benefit from an iOS implementation.
Barclay Brook Elementary School’s kindergarten through second-graders have been learning the basics of computer coding since 2014, but every student, including preschoolers and those with special needs, recently spent an hour in the school’s STEAMaker Lab.
“There will be kids in here coding, anytime you come in this week,” said Nicole Midura, Barclay’s librarian, during the opening morning of “Hour of Code,” a worldwide plan to introduce children to coding.
Well, turns out Apple has just one more thing they need to do before the end of the year...
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Not only are the more recent Doctor Who series missing from my local Netflix, the Christmas episode is also missing from a couple of series that Netflix does carry.
Why, BBC? Why?
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Thanks for reading.
It took my 2014 5K iMac 160 seconds to perform all of those tasks; it took the iMac Pro 96 seconds, meaning that the iMac Pro was able to do the job in 60 percent of the time. Isolate just the processor-intensive task of denoising three hours of audio, and the 5K iMac took 94 seconds, versus 49 seconds for the iMac Pro—a little more than half the time.
The base model iMac Pro features 32GB of RAM in a 4 x 8GB configuration. The iMac Pro features four DIMM sockets, and the 4x 8GB configuration allows it to take advantage of its quad-channel memory capability. This appears to be the same across all iMac Pro memory configs, with 64GB featuring a 4 x 16GB config and 128GB featuring a 4 x 32GB config.
Behind these companies’ efforts to train future talent is an element of competition. There are different tools and platforms competing for users and developers, whether they’re for mobile devices (iOS versus Android) or virtual reality headsets (Daydream, Oculus, Vive). One risk that Hill raises is the desire for these companies to “lock people into their ecosystem and platform.”
Yet the reasons behind corporate efforts to get involved with higher education aren’t entirely selfish, Hill says. He doesn’t discount their altruistic motivations, but thinks their business models of keeping consumers in their ecosystem and platform is problematic, and one schools need to be careful about.
Gene Munster, an investor and analyst with Loup Ventures, and a longtime Apple watcher, says Apple needs to address the issue head on with an open letter to consumers.
For consumers, "this just doesn't make sense," he says. "Apple needs to acknowledge the elephant in the room, and how this is being perceived as something its not, and how the purpose is create a better performing phone, not to sell you an upgrade."
Another interesting detail from Apple’s proxy statement filling is that Tim Cook is now required to fly on private aircraft. This policy was implemented in 2017 and applies to Cook’s business related and personal travel. Apple’s board of directors made the call and says the policy is “in the interests of security and efficiency based on our global profile and the highly visible nature of Mr. Cook’s role as CEO.”
In 2016, Bloomberg called Johny Srouji "the most important Apple executive you've never heard of." It's a well-earned title: Apple is making more custom processors in-house, and Srouji is the brains behind that operation.
Now, a new shareholder proxy statement from Apple reveals that Srouji is officially the company's second-best paid executive, behind only Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts.
Both companies already sell products in Saudi Arabia via third parties but they and other global tech giants have yet to establish a direct presence.
There's nothing like the Christmas break to relax and unwind from the daily stresses of life. If only that feeling could last a little longer, eh?
Here are some useful apps to keep relaxed into the new year if the thought of getting back into the swing of things is proving a little daunting, or, if your new year resolution is just to take life a little easier in 2018.
Short for "Programmers' Calculator," the application has always had the number 42 on its icon, in reference to Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series. Adams himself was even a beta tester of the app, which also included a "Hitchhiker's" easter egg.
Despite my initial reluctance, Alexa has earned a place in our house alongside Siri, which is built into many of my family’s devices, yet barely gets used due to its numerous issues. How did Amazon pull off a feat that other companies have found all but impossible: undermining Apple’s seemingly unstoppable march into every aspect of its users’ digital lives?
So, in almost all the conversations I have had with others during the past few weeks, the X in iPhone X is almost always pronounced as "ex", and not "ten".
I can't imagine Apple not expecting this outcome after coming up with this name. And it seems Apple is okay with it. Which will make the naming of the 2018 iPhones a tad more interesting.
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For many Apple critics, the story ends right here. Siri’s not great, the Touch Bar’s kind of a mess, the operating systems are pretty but somewhat confusing, and the reassuring Home button has been killed … the list goes on. Apple’s far from perfect. Point made.
But here’s the thing: Pick just about any time in Apple’s history, and you’ll find a similar set of worrying choices and seeming failures—even during those halcyon days of Steve Jobs’ triumphant second tenure at the company.
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In fact, Apple rarely gets it perfect at first. But over the years, the company has developed a long-term design process that regularly turns design “mistakes” into successes.
The iPhone X is not the work of an overcautious company. It’s a risk to so fundamentally change the most profitable platform in the world. But Apple is gambling on the taste of the team who lived with the iPhone X during its development. Ossification is a risk with a platform as popular and successful as the iPhone — fear of making unpopular changes can lead a platform vendor to make no significant changes. Another risk, though, is hubris — making changes just for the sake of making changes that show off how clever the folks at Apple still are.
After six weeks using an iPhone X, I’m convinced Apple succeeded. The iPhone X is a triumph, a delightful conceptual modernization of a ten-year-old platform that, prior to using the iPhone X, I didn’t think needed a modernization. Almost nothing about the iPhone X calls undue attention to its cleverness. It all just seems like the new normal, and it’s a lot of fun.
A digital health revolution has been predicted for years, of course, and so far has been more hype than progress. But the hope is that artificial intelligence systems will sift through the vast amounts of data that medical accessories will collect from the Apple Watch and find patterns that can lead to changes in treatment and detection, enabling people to take more control of how they manage their conditions instead of relying solely on doctors.
If you are running iOS 11 on your iPhone, you have additional editing features you can use with your Live Photos if you want to make them play longer. When you have a Live Photo open on your phone, put your finger on the screen and swipe up to see the Effects panel, where you have the choice of Loop, Bounce or Long Exposure. Tap an effect to add it to your image.
I've only recently upgraded to iPhone X from an iPhone 6, so it was only recently that I started taking Live Photos. And, so far, I have not captured anything significant in the 'live' portion of Live Photos.
But I'm still keeping the setting on. No harm, right?
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Thanks for reading.
But IoT, being relatively new, is not without its issues, and HomeKit has its share of these. At the more extreme end, many security experts worry that hackers may be able to get access to unsecured smart home setups, which could be merely inconvenient in some cases but a genuine danger in others. And ransomware, locking up devices around your home until you pay the hacker, is another concern.
With this in mind we've put together a guide to HomeKit security: tips that will help you stay safe in the internet of things and get yourself some peace of mind. HomeKit is generally very reliable and secure, but it pays to be safe.
Apple’s solution should include resolving that problem via hardware recall and replacement, an expensive option. Instead, they slowed the performance of all our phones, and made us pay for the hardware failure.
It allows for more freedom when shooting mobile videos, and sound quality unlike anything you'll ever get with your phone.
What I ate during Christmas: Korean tofu, old cucumber soup，pepporoni pizza.
What I watched during Christmas: The Force Awakens, Doctor Who season 8, Annie (1982).
What I read during Christmas: finishing up The Dark Tower, Draft No 4.
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Thanks for reading.
Music lost a bit of personal connection and became Muzak. I didn’t know the albums by heart. There were no liner notes, no way to learn the story. There was no getting up and changing the CD, a simple effort that brought me closer to the music. Playlists went on forever, and the music just played in the background. Endlessly. I didn’t know who was playing. The snippets became a way of identifying the song, but I couldn’t tell you the name of the song, without looking at the screen. And then the algorithms took over.
“My goal is no music in public places, unless it’s live music,” Hunter said. “Let’s keep music special. Music is not special when it’s part of the wallpaper.”
Now that these devices are small, powerful, and packed with sensors, she says, expect most of those features to show up on the software side of things. "That's where these companies are most able to leverage the data they're accumulating toward interactive, personalized information you'll actually use."
It may have taken them a while to catch up with the Facebooks and Netflixes of the world, but our fitness devices are finally poised to hijack our brains—and bodies—for good.
What Pixelmator Pro does is bring professional image editing tools to the Mac and it does so in part by exploiting the latest macOS features.
It's human nature to get attached to our work. In writing, we say you have to kill your darlings — those extraneous passages and phrases that you lovingly labor over that are ultimately superfluous or detrimental to the story.
And in game development, too, you must learn to cut the overambitious, the unworkable, the self-indulgent. If you don't...well, as we're about to see, it can drag a project down and maybe even stretch the company's finances to breaking point — especially if keeping something you recognize is bad means putting in significant additional work.
Seasons come... seasons go... Now that the canned-Christmas-music season is over at the local supermarket here, it's time for canned-Chinese-New-Year-music season!
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Is there also a sunk-cost-fallacy in life? Why is it so difficult to even think about changing careers midway through life? Even when I imagine what I want to do after retirement -- if I can live that long -- I still come back to the same-old same-old of software and stuff. Is it due to my lack of imagination, or is there something deeper at work?
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Thanks for reading. Merry Christmas!
But reduced performance through software updates as the batteries age is not the only potential solution to the engineering problem at hand. Apple is unique in the smartphone world in that it designs all aspects of the iPhone, from the processor to the operating system. And it has full control over the production of the battery system. Knowing the battery size (which also limits the total peak power draw from the battery) and software system in play, Apple could have (and I would argue should have) designed a processor that would provide consistent performance throughout the life of the phone.
In short, Apple’s goal should be to make it easier for developers to create good Mac apps, and easier for Mac and iOS app siblings to share code. Apple’s goal should not be to make it easier to get iOS apps to run on the Mac in slightly modified form. And I think it’s nonsensical to think that Apple is working toward a single unified OS. The best reason for hope on this front is the recent redoubling of Apple’s efforts on pro Mac hardware. The iMac Pro was not designed to run iPhone apps.
Merry Christmas. May there be peace in your hearts.
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Thanks for reading.
iPhone X owners have found that Face ID isn't available as an authentication method for the "Ask to Buy" feature, which allows parents to approve their kids' iOS purchases and downloads. Instead, the parent (or any other "family organizer," as Apple terms it) must enter their entire Apple account password to approve each individual purchase attempt.
"You're unlikely to see a massive difference between these two cards if all you are doing is gaming, but if you're using tools that tax the card in ways that are not actively shown on the screen at 90fps (as graphic artists/game devs tend to do) the difference is a great deal more substantial."
"Visual artists/developers will see a significant performance difference between these two machines, but general consumers likely would not."
The battery replacement problem is an example why a growing community of gadget lovers are calling for laws to ensure consumers have a legal “right to repair” their own electronics. Laws proposed in a handful of states would help prevent tech companies from locking down devices with software and make repair manuals available to the public.
Guess who has lobbied against those laws? Tech companies, including Apple.
Whether you're pounding out endnotes for a nonfiction book or slowly crafting characters to set loose in your next novel, Scrivener provides a place to create, edit, and organize all your work, especially long-form pieces.
Schmidt’s departure from the executive chair role ends Silicon Valley’s most successful execution—ever—of the dilemma that Google’s funders were coping with in the firm’s early days. How do you bring in an authoritative leader without dimming the brilliance of the callow founders who made the company valuable in the first place? Though Schmidt won deserved plaudits for his tenure as CEO, his most impressive feat was a delicate balancing act of being both the boss of Google’s freewheeling founders—supplying so-called “adult supervision”—and enthusiastically assuming the role of their student as well. All too aware of how similar situations wound up in continual boardroom spats between a hoodied founder and a khakied executive, Schmidt determined early on that exercising authority over Page and Brin would lead to disaster. He never missed an opportunity to ostentatiously proclaim the genius of his younger colleagues. (When I questioned him once about using that word, he replied, “I wasn’t using it deliberately, but now that you’ve pointed it out, it is what I believe.”) And he didn’t let his own ego lead him to put his mark on the firm just because he could. “My opinion is that the culture of companies is set very early,” he told me in 2004, “It would have been foolish for me to try to change them much, because it wouldn’t have worked, and it would’ve been bad. It’s sort of a given that this is how the company works now. If you changed it you’d lose all of its great things.”
Is Apple doing this to get me to buy a new phone?
Apple says no, its software feature is aimed to do the opposite: help you prolong the life of your device. Still, it didn't exactly advertise that all you may need to do to have a faster phone is change its battery, and that's causing an outcry.
Direct battery fixes certainly would have made the most sense. But even allowing that a software tweak was the only way Apple could have proceeded—untrue, but just for argument's sake—it had a much better option than making its software solution covert.
Rather than quietly push out an update that crimped older iPhones, it should have made that throttling opt-in. As it stands, there's no way to avoid having your phone slowed down once the battery reaches its limits. By giving users the choice, and giving them the information necessary to make their own decision, Apple could avoid the frustrations many have expressed over the policy.
Is Apple being helpful in addressing a known chemical problem? Or is there a specific fault with some iPhones, which Apple is effectively hiding?
"If you stuck with an older version of iOS, then what would happen would be your phone would be fast, but it might crash randomly," Poole said. "So that's really not an ideal situation if you're relying on your phone day to day, like most of us are. The other problem with holding back on security updates is you lose the security improvements and fixes that Apple makes with every release, thus putting you in danger of ... hackers and whatnot."
Two separate class-action lawsuits were filed Thursday, brought by plaintiffs in California and Illinois, arguing that Apple did not have consent to slow down their iPhones.
Two people from Chicago, along with residents of Ohio, Indiana and North Carolina, claim that Apple’s iOS updates were designed to “purposefully slow down the performance speeds” of the phones “fraudulently forcing iPhone owners to purchase the latest model offered by Apple.”
The ideas of living in the present and emphasizing control over your reactions to external events (rather than to the events themselves) are found in ancient philosophies like Stoicism and Buddhism. It’s one thing to read about these things, but it was helpful to realize them on my own, in the simplified and sandboxed environment of video game play.
The split between the movers and those left behind has also created a sense of two classes within Apple.
Apple's most valuable talent will be moving to the ring, including executives like CEO Tim Cook, teams full of software developers, and Apple Chief Design Officer Jony Ive's design teams, which will get one of the nicest spots on the fourth floor of the building.
But less important divisions, like App Store workers and retail operations, are expected to remain in satellite offices scattered around Silicon Valley. This means those people will often have to travel using Apple's shuttle service to another office just to attend meetings.
The concept of the app is simple: just select the photos you want to turn into a video, choose your video format, and share. Live Memories combines each clip into one continuous video, allowing you to sit back and watch your Live Photos without constantly swiping and pressing.
There are two things I like a lot about AutoSleep’s Watch app. First, I don’t have to do anything to track my sleep. The app just figures out how much I slept based on factors like movement with remarkable accuracy. If AutoSleep is off a little though, you can edit your sleep time in the iPhone app.
Second, I like the glanceable data the Watch app provides. I can see how much I slept the previous night, how that compares to my seven-day average, as well as sleep time, quality, heart rate, and other basic statistics.
Taking place over centuries, the player must take their civilization from the Stone Age to the Information Age, advancing their culture and researching new technologies over time.
The ability of advertisers to deliver their message to the precise audience most likely to respond is the cornerstone of Facebook’s business model. But using the system to expose job opportunities only to certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers.
Several experts questioned whether the practice is in keeping with the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which prohibits bias against people 40 or older in hiring or employment. Many jurisdictions make it a crime to "aid” or "abet” age discrimination, a provision that could apply to companies like Facebook that distribute job ads.
Is this just another bad week for Apple? My guess: much worse than that previous bad week. From here on out, for anything that runs just a tad slower on an iPhone -- be it the OS, first-party app, third-party app, anything -- the blame will goes to Apple and its intentional throttling.
On hindsight, Apple could have done better. Probably an opt-out option would have worked.
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Thanks for reading.
The short form version of what Poole’s benchmarks are showing is the result of a power curve smoothing algorithm that Apple rolled out last year to mitigate iPhone shutdown issues. [...] Basically, iPhones were hitting peaks of processor power that the battery was unable to power and the phones were shutting off. Apple then added power management to all iPhones at the time that would ‘smooth out’ those peaks by either capping the power available from the battery or by spreading power requests over several cycles.
[...]
But, as a matter of transparency, I think that beyond saying very publicly that they are doing this power management (which they have now done twice) there could be an avenue here to be more aggressive and transparent with the user about when their battery is directly affecting the peak performance of their iPhone.
“I think users who experience significant slowdowns due to battery wear would want Apple to be more transparent about this issue,” says Poole. “A notification stating that the battery needs service would be a simple way to reduce users’ concerns and help them address this problem.”
I’ve said the following before, but I’ll say it again: Apple does not purposefully cripple older devices to encourage users to buy new devices. Nor would it be in their long-term interest to do so.
While details vary from Siri to Cortana to Google et al, the process of teaching these assistants new languages looks more or less the same across the board. That’s because it’s determined by how a virtual assistant works, specifically how it processes language.
So if Siri doesn't talk to you in your mother tongue right now, you’re probably going to have to wait for the technology driving her to make a leap. Luckily, the first signs of such an evolution have arrived.
The U.S. Republican tax overhaul passed by Congress this week will allow Apple Inc to bring back its $252.3 billion foreign cash pile without a major tax hit - a long-standing company goal.
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But not everything went the company’s way. A critical difference between the Senate version of the bill and the final version could actually raise the amount of cash taxes that Apple pays on profits from patents held abroad, tax experts said.
In 2006, Hon Hai Precision Industry was about to take on a major role in an epochal shift in consumer electronics, though few of the Taiwanese company's employees could have imagined what was about to hit them. At the time, the company, better known as Foxconn, made most of its money assembling personal computers for big American companies like Dell. But a contract for a new product -- one that had been an obsession of Apple CEO Steve Jobs for years -- would soon change all that.
Over the next decade, the iPhone would help push Foxconn's revenue from $38 billion to $145 billion and turn it into one of the world's largest employers. Meanwhile, Dell -- once a marquee customer of Foxconn's -- was bought out by founder Michael Dell and taken private in 2013, having fallen victim to the rise of tablets and smartphones.
The introduction of the iPhone X in September capped a remarkable 10-year run of Apple's iconic smartphone. There have been more than 1.2 billion iPhones sold globally since its launch in 2007, transforming the fortunes of Apple and large swaths of Asia's tech industry. Besides Foxconn, it helped turn Asian companies like lens maker Largan Precision into giants, while once-mighty electronics groups like Acer and Nintendo were forced to take massive writedowns. Along the way, Apple and its Asian suppliers came under withering scrutiny over labor practices in the region, forcing companies such as Foxconn to adapt their policies.
When I woke up this morning, I did my usual email check. Surprisingly, there was an email from Apple telling me that they were automatically refunding me for my purchase of Cuphead. They mentioned that the app had been pulled from the App Store and were sorry for the inconvenience.
Core to this is the idea that, while it’s fine for small businesses and organizations to go through a middleman like the app templating services, the app template providers shouldn’t be the ones ultimately publishing these apps on their clients’ behalf.
Instead, Apple wants every app on the App Store to be published by the business or organization behind the app. (This is something that’s been suggested before). That means your local pizza shop, your church, your gym, etc. needs to have reviewed the App Store documentation and licensing agreement themselves, and more actively participate in the app publishing process.
Well, it seems the recent "loot box" drama of Star Wars: Battlefront II which set the internet on fire might have caused Apple to institute an official policy before they face a similar PR disaster of their own. [...] If you're buying something random, you need to know your chances of getting things. Historically, Apple's policies have favored consumers, and forcing developers to show that the cool hat you really want out of that loot crate only has a 0.001% chance of being there when you open it is pretty consumer friendly.
I'm learning Sudoku -- I'm 25% into this Sudioku book that claims the puzzles presented are either "Demanding" or "Very Challenging."
I'm enjoying Sudoku because it shuts my brain off from thinking bad things.
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I always find it puzzling how Americans can get through life with how they pronounce "can" and "can't." I would imagine that causes a lot of confusion. I grew up with the Briitsh pronounciation and I very much prefer it.
(Here's a video illustrating the differences.)
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Thanks for reading.
Imagine HomeKit as the butler for your home, and when you are not at home, you can send iMessage to it asking it to do things for you. Say you want to unlock the front door, you would send a message to HomeKit asking it to unlock the front door. Once HomeKit receive the message, it should check that the message is sent by you and then unlock the door as you have asked. Except that in reality, HomeKit doesn’t check who sent the message and it will happily unlock the door whenever someone ask it to do so.
In order for HomeKit to do something, the message needs to contain a unique identifier that identifies the object (accessory, scene, or room) in the home. Normally it should be impossible for anyone to figure out the unique identifier for those objects unless you are actually authorized to access that home in HomeKit. However, there are two separate bugs, one in watchOS 4 - 4.1, and another in iOS 11.2 and watchOS 4.2, allow someone to figure out those unique identifiers without authorizing the person to access the home in first place. With those unique identifiers, remote attacker can ask HomeKit to do almost anything.
Google has gathered so much data, in so many areas, that it’s now crunching it together and creating features that Apple can’t make—surrounding Google Maps with a moat of time.
Apple is consistently making choices to protect users privacy and security. In the face of the kinds of attacks we've been seeing, from the "hack in a box" that Chinese criminals were selling to the sophisticated hacking Jupiter's VPN, the better security is on phones and in communications, the better off we all are. So while Nick is right on the current vulnerability in iMessage, he has it wrong on both on Apple's legal obligations under CALEA and how easy it would be for the company to accommodate law enforcement's demands.
And now Japan may have come up with a better solution: an app that matches pregnant women requesting a seat with riders who have agreed in advance to give them up upon request.
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As my colleague Linda Poon pointed out last year about the pink light technology, such strategies are particularly helpful for those with hidden or invisible conditions. Such passengers might be more reluctant to ask for a seat for fear that others will balk, not believing they actually need it.
“Think of how you learn something new,” Feiner told me. “If someone were showing you how to use a complicated photocopy machine, they’d have their hands in there, pointing at things. That’s what you can do with AR.”
This store will be located in Federation Square and comes as part of Australia’s efforts to “breathe new life into one of Melbourne’s most iconic landmarks.”
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Apple retail head Angela Ahrendts says the company is thrilled to move forward with plans for a new flagship in Australia, noting of the surrounding museums and historical landmarks that Apple will get to call its neighbors.
Critics of Wednesday’s decision the proposed design of the Apple store would be inconsistent with that overall design, as well as inconsistent with the square’s original purpose.
When users tap the button to listen to a song, the app will now save a sample for upload when internet access returns.
The apps for Roku and Apple TV, originally slated to launch before the end of 2017, are now scheduled for the first quarter of 2018.
Speaking to Maureen Dowd for a Vanity Fair article published in April, Musk gave an example of an artificial intelligence that’s given the task of picking strawberries. It seems harmless enough, but as the AI redesigns itself to be more effective, it might decide that the best way to maximize its output would be to destroy civilization and convert the entire surface of the Earth into strawberry fields. Thus, in its pursuit of a seemingly innocuous goal, an AI could bring about the extinction of humanity purely as an unintended side effect.
This scenario sounds absurd to most people, yet there are a surprising number of technologists who think it illustrates a real danger. Why? Perhaps it’s because they’re already accustomed to entities that operate this way: Silicon Valley tech companies.
Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly stated his belief that technology should be accessible to everyone. For decades, Apple products have shipped with accessibility features, proof that these values are deeply rooted in the company. Apple even launched a dedicated accessibility website in 2016, showcasing the stories of several individuals and how their lives have benefited from accessible products.
One branch of accessibility that’s received an increasing amount of attention is hearing. While iOS has supported hearing aids in some capacity for years, deep integration with the iPhone first became possible when Apple expanded its Made for iPhone (MFi) licensing program to cover hearing devices. Advancements in Bluetooth Low Energy technology in concert with a proprietary audio transmission protocol have been essential in enabling a steady stream of iPhone-compatible hearing aids and cochlear implants to be released.
It’s not too surprising that somebody would try to rip off Cuphead for a platform like iOS. But it’s very surprising that Apple would let it slip through the submission process, when its legitimacy falls apart under basic investigation — especially because Cuphead was one of the most highly anticipated games of the year.
Japanese researchers say they have developed a new type of glass that can heal itself from cracks and breaks.
Glass made from a low weight polymer called “polyether-thioureas” can heal breaks when pressed together by hand without the need for high heat to melt the material.
Final Cut Pro 10.4 is a big update with several new tentpole features, but these smaller features prove that Apple is listening to basic usability requests as well.
Available for macOS and Windows, Plexamp was built by a handful of Plex employees as an homage to music players of the past that also serves as a testbed for new services.
One thing that’s hard to deny is that the Slim Book is far more versatile than the Smart Keyboard. The Smart Keyboard is limited to one viewing angle, while the Slim Book can be adjusted to any angle and the keyboard part can be completely removed if necessary.
The Slim Book offers a case mode that completely detaches the actual keyboard in instances where you want to be ultra-portable. There’s also a video mode that uses the keyboard as a stand to make it easier to watch videos, and it’s far sturdier than the Smart Keyboard stand.
Like the Wi-Fi-enabled SD card I previously used, you have to download a custom app in order to view the contents of the SD card and transfer it over to your iPad or iPhone. The difference is speed. The MobileLite’s Wi-Fi transfer speeds are vastly better than those from the tiny SD card.
So when I started hearing about a new way to learn–through coding robots–my interest was reignited. Although many such robots are geared toward kids and STEM education, adults with limited coding knowledge can also have fun while learning coding with them. But the difference is that adults aren’t normally in daily classroom settings that teach coding like kids are.
A screenshot of an email being circulated around the internet in the last day supposedly revealed new strict app review policies. We have confirmed with sources that this email is not legitimate communication and does not reflect a real Apple policy decision.
Critics have questioned whether Apple is getting sloppy. Schiller says there are "no excuses" but rejects this characterisation. "We just had a bad week. A couple of things happened, that's all. The team is going to audit the systems and look carefully at the process and do some soul-searching, and do everything that they can to keep this from happening again."
The delay of the HomePod is undoubtedly a blow. The market for smart speakers is taking off, and having to release it on the other side of Christmas will hit sales. Schiller is unapologetic about refusing to hit the deadline for the sake of it.
"I'll just say that it's not ready yet, and one of the things a lot of our customers appreciate is that we're never afraid to wait to ship something," he says. "Not everyone in our industry follows that model. We're at the very, very beginning of this market of intelligent music speakers that we want in our home."
After all, Tim Cook said it was going to be important again! Why couldn’t Apple kill two desktop birds with one flexible platform stone?
The biggest problem is flexibility. A Mac Pro chassis has to be able to tolerate a wide range of thermal and power demands. There may be a huge gap between the entry model and the highest-end custom configurations.
We’ve already seen hints of a U-turn with recent iPad Pro developments. With its Smart Keyboard and Pencil it’s the ultimate toaster-fridge apostasy, an alternative to Mac (and other) laptops, an unofficially acknowledged answer to Microsoft’s hybrid Surface device family.
How far will reversals go?
As we enter the final stretch of holiday shopping this week, Apple’s AirPods are again facing supply issues. After once improving to 3-5 day delivery, and even quicker in some cases, you now won’t get them in time for Christmas if you buy straight from Apple.
The simple game requires players to use their eyebrows to move an emoji face up and down the screen to collect stars, worth one point each, while avoiding other emoji obstacles such as cars, basketballs, and ducks.
My guess is that Apple is unlikely to release another machine like the Mac mini -- a low-cost introduction to the Mac ecosystem for switchers from Windows. That machine has been replaced -- it's all about portables, not desktops, nowadays, and it's all about iOS, not macOS.
The iPad is that machine. (And rumors are circulating now that Apple is planning to push the price even lower.)
What does that leave us? If low-cost is not a major consideration for the future of Mac mini, then having the same chassis for both the mini and the Pro will not be that far-fetched anymore.
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One must always remember what Apple executives say in the public may not match exactly what Apple is actually doing out of public's eyes.
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The crowd roared as the band came out on stage, but the lights remained extremely low. That built drama for the audience, but it ruined any opportunity I had to get shots. As opening song "Technology" kicked in -- deafening me instantly as I was right in front of a giant speaker -- the stage lights burst into action. While the spotlights lit up the performers, the lights were erratic -- swooping around the stage and strobing on and off. I needed the light to remain on the faces long enough to get a clean shot, but the window of opportunity was sometimes there for less than a second.
The solution? Burst mode. By holding my finger on the shutter button, I could take multiple shots per second. All it takes is a second for singer Rob Damiani's face to catch the light as the beam speeds past him. In those instant moments, I could only hope I was getting the shot -- after the show I was able to go through the burst captures and select the shot where the light was just right.
Offtime, Moment and Space are providing services that stop, track and examine your usage. While a worthy development, the code to crack for these early systems will be to educate users in a way that doesn’t make them feel bad about their usage and subsequently delete the app. The long term solution is likely an integrated approach – blending hardware and software, something that really hasn’t been done yet.
With an integrated hardware and software approach, we need to start by defining our own self management strategies (or even recognize that we need one). But there is a much larger opportunity in reimagining the home as a starting point for parents, their children and the education process of device addiction.
U.S. lawmakers appear close to passing a tax bill that will make it cheaper for companies to repatriate money currently held overseas. That could potentially provide a bigger domestic cash stash for Apple to buy American companies.
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So will 2018 be the year when Apple finally goes on a buying binge worthy of its massive cash holdings? While it seems compelling for many reasons to say yes, one also can’t help note that Apple didn’t accumulate that stockpile by being excessively spendy. And so far, it hasn’t needed a lot of pricey startup purchases to maintain its place as the world’s most valuable public technology company.
If you decorate your home for the holidays, you can make things a little more futuristic and a lot more interesting by adding some HomeKit enabled devices to the mix!
That way you can ask Siri to turn off your tree, power down your inflatable reindeer, and shut down the red and green yard lights.
“He said had I kept sleeping, I probably wouldn’t have woken up. I would have died in my sleep.”
This especially struck me personally because my grandfather died at 55 from a heart attack in the middle of the night — 13 years before the Apple Watch existed. Now, this technology is accessible for a few hundred dollars and can actually save lives.
It was recently discovered in a support document for Apple Configurator 2 that the iMac Pro may become unresponsive and will need to be restored in certain situations like a power failure during an update.
First things first, you're going to need access to a second Mac running the latest version of macOS High Sierra, as well as Apple Configurator 2.6, Apple's device management software.
"We have been working with Microsoft to deliver the full iTunes experience to our customers and we need a little more time to get it right," said an Apple spokesperson via an emailed statement.
Ronald D. Moore is heading back to space. Apple has given a straight-to-series order to a space drama from the Battlestar Galactica developer. The untitled project hails from Sony Pictures Television and Moore’s studio-based Tall Ship Productions.
Created and written by Moore, along with Fargo co-executive producers Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, the untitled series explores what would have happened if the global space race had never ended.
Apple announced today via its YouTube channel that it is bringing more original live music video content to Apple Music. Musician centered documentaries and concert films have become an Apple Music staple and Noel Gallagher is the latest artist to join the ever-growing list of featured artists.
So what does Lightroom CC bring to the game for someone taking stock of their photo system? I see two main areas that are appealing: the capability to perform local adjustments within an image and the way Adobe has built the cloud synchronization.
Apple has unveiled a new collection of open-source utility code for Swift developers, grown out of its Swift Package Manager project. The collection contains some interesting new data types (OrderedSet – hurray!), some tools to make command line programs easier to write, and some helpers for common tasks like temporary files and SHA hashing.
I’m not dead yet.
But try telling that to Google.
For much of the last week, I have been trying to persuade the world’s most powerful search engine to remove my photo from biographical details that belong to someone else. A search for “Rachel Abrams” revealed that Google had mashed my picture from The New York Times’s website with the Wikipedia entry for a better-known writer with the same name, who died in 2013.
If Apple hadn’t announced it was bringing back the Mac Pro earlier this year, this would be a bigger deal; all the weight of expectations of Apple’s high-end user base would be crashing down on the iMac Pro. Instead, the iMac Pro is just the first shoe to drop in a revitalization of Apple’s pro Mac desktop line.
That’s good, because the iMac Pro doesn’t have a lot of features that many people will still wish for in a Mac Pro, mostly regarding upgradability.
There is no rear hatch because the RAM in the iMac Pro is not user upgradeable following purchase, but there's good news -- an Apple Store or an Apple Authorized Service Provider is able to open up the iMac Pro and swap out the RAM.
Business models for music will come and go but music consumption is increasing. Access to the long tail has meant genres proliferated and production has spread to everyone who cares to try to make music.
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Apple realizes this and the acquisition of Shazam and the launch of EarPods and of HomePod are to serve music.
The United States is at its best when all people are free to pursue their dreams. Our country has enjoyed unparalleled success by welcoming people from around the world who seek to make a better life for themselves and their families, no matter what their backgrounds. It is our differences that help us to learn from each other, to challenge our old ways of thinking and to discover innovative solutions that benefit us all. To advance that prosperity and build an even stronger future, each successive generation — including, today, our own — must show the courage to embrace that diversity and to do what is right.
We have no illusions about how difficult it can be to get things done in Washington, and we know that people of good faith disagree about aspects of immigration policy. If ever there were an occasion to come together to help people improve their lives, this is it. By acting now to ensure that dreamers can realize their potential by continuing to contribute to our country, Congress can reaffirm this essential American ideal.
It’s a 0.8 meter (2.62 feet) USB-C to USB-C cable, and it can transfer data at up to 40 Gbps while charging at up to 100W. It costs $39, or twice what Apple’s two meter long cable that it includes with its laptops goes for.
According to the release notes, the latest iteration is capable of supporting up to 36 cores, more than double the core count offered by the 18-core model offered in the current iMac Pro range.
To celebrate the holiday season, and boost Apple Pay adoption, Apple has launched a promotion with select vendors that will award online purchasers that use the payment service a $5 App Store and iTunes gift card.
Unlike all the other Macs Apple offers, the Mac mini doesn't require you to conform to Apple's view of what a screen should be. This is important, because we tend to hang our screens on monitor arms and stands, and sometimes use very big screens.
Version 1 already had some amazing capabilities, including recognizing friends, guessing the emotions of people from their facial expressions, reading printed text and identifying products from their bar-codes. But version 2 adds four new capabilities.
Dropbox Paper is the company’s collaborative focused software for teams and businesses. [...] Today’s update brings updates to the UI, editing capabilities, to-do functionality, and calendar integration.
The iPad has many, many amazing effects apps for making music, and several high-level apps just for emulating guitar amplifiers and effects pedals. But what if you just want to plug in and play a song, and have your guitar sound just like the one on the record? That’s exactly what Tonebridge is for. Under the hood, this simulator app is as powerful as the others, but it’s way, way simpler to use.
"I can confirm that we are assorting Apple TV and Chromecast," an Amazon spokeswoman told CNET on Thursday, referring to the company's plans to stock up on the devices. She offered no further statements.
At WWDC this year, Apple announced it would soon offer its own podcast analytics service for show creators who publish on iTunes. Today, that service has launched into beta, offering podcasters the ability to track unique devices and playback metrics for their podcasts, including when listeners drop off in the middle of a show.
The Home screen of the latest iOS can, sometimes, be lacking in responsivness.
Sometimes, especially when I first wake up my iPhone, tapping on a folder does not open the folder immediately. So I thought something was wrong with my finger and I tap again. Which then iOS will open the folder -- responding to the first tap, and then immediately close the folder back up -- responding to the second tap.
And sometimes, the haptic feedback is mising when I do a 3D touch. The 3D touch was successfully execute, sans the vibration that makes me feel I am doing a 3D touch.
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The previously mentioned T2 chip doesn’t just do things like image and audio processing; it offers a dedicated encryption engine for the machine’s flash storage. There is a Secure Enclave processor which manages security keys. Additionally, Apple offers a secure boot feature in which the T2 chip validates the boot loader, the boot loader validates the firmware, the firmware validates the kernel, and the kernel validates the drivers. Apple wants end-to-end security, and on-the-fly encryption, and it’s all rooted in the T2 chip, without hitting the CPU. You’ll be able to turn this security on or off, or use a medium setting for developer use cases.
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Six third-party developers of professional-use software have demonstrated how they're supporting or using the iMac Pro. In some cases, it was just about better performance. In others, they claimed new features or capabilities were possible because the Mac spec ceiling is so much higher now. Unfortunately, we were not provided hard benchmarks in any case. Instead, we saw live demos by the developers and heard their anecdotal reports of performance. We'll have to wait until a future review to do objective benchmarks.
There’s a lot to be said for the iMac Pro. It’s the first Mac with workstation-level processors with a plethora of processor cores (8 and up!) since the Mac Pro in 2013. The Radeon Pro Vega is the most powerful graphic processor ever in a Mac.
If you’re someone who uses a 5K iMac to get work done today, should you consider buying the iMac Pro or not? Here’s a list of reasons why you should--and also a few reasons you might want to keep that credit card in your pocket.
Although this latest Final Cut Pro X update brings it to version 10.4, don’t be fooled into thinking it contains only minor features or bug fixes. On the contrary, Final Cut Pro 10.4 contains several new major features and/or enhancements, along with a slew of other additions, making this one of the biggest releases in the app’s six-and-a-half year history.
After visiting with Apple in New York for a demonstration of the update, we’ve been testing Final Cut Pro 10.4 to learn all about what’s changed. In this hands-on post and high-level video walkthrough, we showcase many of the newest changes and features, including 360° video editing, enhanced color grading, HDR updates, iMovie for iOS support, HEVC, custom LUTs, and more.
The software update restores remote access in HomeKit for shared users which was temporarily disabled last week to address a vulnerability in Apple’s smart home framework that allowed unauthorized access in certain circumstances. Apple has also released tvOS 11.2.1 which is likely related to the fix.
"We're not thinking in terms of a fund limit," Williams said. "We're thinking about, where are the opportunities across the U.S. to help nurture companies that are making the advanced technology — and the advanced manufacturing that goes with that — that quite frankly is essential to our innovation."
Apple today began listing indoor maps for malls and airports on its iOS 11 feature availability page, giving us a clear picture of exactly where the indoor mapping feature is available for the first time.
The marquee addition to Bear 1.4 is autocomplete, which is most notable when adding tags to a note. Now, instead of remembering which tags you've already added to your notes in Bear, you can start typing a pound sign and the first letter of a tag, and Bear will show you an inline popup with tag suggestions. Tap one, and the tag immediately gets added to the note without typing it in full. This not only simplifies how you can organize your notes with tags, but it also ensures you always use consistent tag names as you won't end up with duplicates.
Muffles, which are rules that partially hide tweets from your timeline, can be temporarily disabled now. Previously, the only way to deactivate a Muffle was to delete it.
In addition to 21st Century Fox's movie studio and regional sports networks, Disney is buying cable channels FX and National Geographic. Disney will also get Fox's stakes in Hulu and European pay-TV provider Sky.
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The deal allows Disney to expand its content, especially for streaming services. In addition to a majority stake in Hulu that it will have once the deal closes, Disney is preparing to launch two separate streaming services, one for sports and another focusing on entertainment. And it is pulling its content from Netflix in preparation for the launch.
Is Lisa Simpsons the next Disney Princess?
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The 14- and 18-core iMac Pro won’t be available until later in 2018, but the 8- and 10-core variants will be available for order on December 14th. The 14-core iMac Pro wasn’t known about until today, but it makes sense considering that Intel’s 14-Core W-class Xeon processor is already a part of its existing lineup.
What the iMac lacks such as Nvidia graphics options, upgradability, expansion and user upgradeable hardware plus a wider gamut stand alone monitor, we can only hope, will be the hallmarks of the unreleased Mac Pro.
But if I had to have clients in a room editing, I would move heaven and earth to have this machine in the room. For cool, effortless editing of modern 4K material, - faithfully and quickly, this is a near perfect machine.
Perhaps the most important thing about the iMac Pro, is what was promised. Not only do the developer and creative communities hunger for a fast Pro iMac, but it is even more keen to see Apple hold to Phil Schiller's promises of re-committing to the developer community.
I tend to do most of my engineering and CFD-related software development working in a terminal with C and Fortran compilers, but for my iOS and Mac app development work I spend a lot of time in Xcode. A lot. A few weeks ago I was debugging an especially nasty MapKit tile rendering bug while racing to get my augmented reality app Theodolite ready for iPhone X, and I am pretty sure I clicked Xcode’s build/run button thousands of times over a couple days (at least it felt that way). When you get into an intense development or debug cycle that involves a lot of compiles, saving fractions of seconds here and there adds up and can give you extra hours in a day. This is one area where the 10-core iMac Pro shines when combined with Xcode’s ability to automatically take advantage of multiple cores to compile multiple source files simultaneously.
Most of my apps have around 20,000-30,000 lines of code spread out over 80-120 source files (mostly Obj-C and C with a teeny amount of Swift mixed in). There are so many variables that go into compile performance that it’s hard to come up with a benchmark that is universally relevant, so I’ll simply note that I saw reductions in compile time of between 30-60% while working on apps when I compared the iMac Pro to my 2016 MacBook Pro and 2013 iMac. If you’re developing for iOS you’ll still be subject to the bottleneck of installing and launching an app on the simulator or a device, but when developing for the Mac this makes a pretty noticeable improvement in repetitive code-compile-test cycles.
I found a very consistent set of results: a 2X to 3X boost in speed (relative to my current iMac and MacBook Pro 15”) a noticeable leap from most generational jumps that are generally ten times smaller.
Whether you’re editing 8K RED video, H.264 4K Drone footage, 6K 3D VR content or 50 Megapixel RAW stills – you can expect a 200-300% increase in performance in almost every industry leading software with the iMac Pro.
"We’re a resource for people in-between therapy sessions that’s low-cost and on-the-go. We need as many tools as we can to work on our well-being, especially preventive. How can we help people more preventively to focus on their mental health and get an on-the-go solution that works for their world? That’s how we see it."
Almost a year ago, David Smith released Workouts++, an alternative to watchOS’ built-in Workout app that adds an iOS component to leverage the data collected during workouts. Today, Smith released version 2.0 of Workouts++ with a host of new features enabled by advances in the Apple Watch and Apple’s health and fitness APIs, including podcast playback, location tracking and mapping, support for new workout types, Siri integration, and more. On top of that, Workouts++ is now free with no In-App Purchases, advertising, or subscription.
Apple has hired two legal execs — Philip Matthys from Hulu and Jennifer Wang Grazier from Legendary Entertainment — for key business affairs roles on its expanding original entertainment team, Variety has learned.
That sale price has many seeing ominous signs for the stable of unicorns stuck with ungainly valuations above $1 billion. In a statement via email, Mark Tluszcz, CEO at Mangrove Capital Partners and chair of Wix.com, warned that the low sale price of Shazam should serve as a warning that a big correction is coming following a period of venture capital excess.
Finisar is the latest recipient of an award from Apple’s $1 billion Advanced Manufacturing Fund to support innovation and job creation by American manufacturers. The $390 million will allow Finisar to increase the production of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), which power some of Apple’s most popular new features. Face ID, Portrait mode selfies and Animoji all use VCSEL technology.
An overhaul to the U.S. corporate tax means much more to Apple than just a different tax rate going forward. A territorial-based tax system will allow Apple to manage future cash generation much more efficiently. The days of Apple being stuck with too much cash in international subsidiaries are numbered. In addition, concerns surrounding Apple issuing too much debt will subside as the company will no longer need to rely on debt issuance to fund share buyback and quarterly cash dividend. These changes amount to a sustainable strategy for Apple to use when managing its massive balance sheet. There is finally light at the end of Apple's cash dilemma tunnel.
Apple has updated its updated its existing AirPort devices with firmware updates that patches vulnerabilities to KRACK attacks that allow a malicious hacker to bypass WPA2 encryption on Wi-Fi networks and make a user's data easy to view.
Mail to Things consists of an email address to forward messages to, which will become tasks in Things' inbox. Because the email address is unique to your account, you need to enable it from the app's Things Cloud settings pane, which will generate a personalized email address you can copy and save to your address book.
The few things that prevented Djay Pro from being true crossover professional software have now been added with the new version. Djay Pro 2 comes with, among other changes, a revamped user interface and an advanced library management system and core updates that make the app more nimble to use for those with large libraries of music.
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Watching Automix at work is wild. It will select the next song from your library that will best match with what’s currently playing, slowly fade over once it’s time to mix out, and even employ on-the-fly EQing and filters during the transition. It’s not perfect; there were several times I tried to “trick” the software by throwing it odd tempo changes or songs with little to no intro and the resulting mix was clunky. But in other instances it surprised me.
Overall, djay Pro 2 remains a feature-packed DJ app for the Mac, and Algoriddim continues to raise the bar by both adding new capabilities and making existing ones easier to use. There's still a bit of learning curve, but once you start to figure things out it becomes pretty intuitive. The feature set also scales with your experience, letting beginning DJs get familiar with the basics before moving on to more sophisticated skills.
These are the realities of being in Apple’s ecosystem: we don’t get a lot of advance notice, nor do we get a test device to ensure our things work well. If you want to get ahead in a crowded market (like, ahem, camera apps) you have to take a risk: try to improvise and use some ingenuity to figure out if you can play to the strengths of a new device.
We were incredibly relieved to find that it worked well, and our attempts to embrace the limitations and quirks of the hardware were rewarded with great press coverage.
It is not hard, to me, to imagine the new iMac Pro being conceived originally to replace the circular Mac Pro. After all, by going to all-in-one design for all products, Apple can eventually have the authentication sensors (be it Face ID or Touch ID), the secure enclave, and the CPU housed in a single unit that can be made as tamper-proof as possible.
Furthermore, a desktop computer that sits on a desk will make it easier to do Face ID (or Touch ID) than a desktop computer (like the previous Mac Pro) that sits underneath a desk. (Feet ID, anyone?) That may be the motivation for Apple to make the current Mac Pro to be that much smaller in foot-print.
But then again, why is Apple now making a new Mac Pro? Will the new Mac Pro be optimized differently, so much so that customers do not mind giving up on Face ID and Touch ID? (I don't think Apple will ever do a Touch ID that is on an external keyboard.)
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“Most people are comfortable with it within minutes – 30 minutes, whatever. It’s not the kind of thing you have to live with for a week or two to get used to. It doesn’t mean… you know, we’ve still got muscle memory sometimes and we might try to do something and we remember, ‘Oh no, that’s not how you do it’ - you want to swipe up on an iPhone 8 or 7, or on an iPad, and no, it doesn’t work that way. That, to me, is always the sign of some or our most advanced, best thought-out technology: they become intuitive incredibly quickly and change how you think about everything else you use.
Schiller acknowledges that Apple “knew what we had” with Touch ID and that it knew what it had created with the home button through the years. “We knew it was no small thing to decide to replace that.” He adds that Apple believed it could make something that people would love and would have bigger potential over time.
Researcher Ian Carroll filed the necessary paperwork to incorporate a business called Stripe Inc. He then used the legal entity to apply for an EV certificate to authenticate the Web page https://stripe.ian.sh/. When viewed in the address bar, the page looks eerily similar to https://stripe.com/, the online payments service that also authenticates itself using an EV certificate issued to Stripe Inc.
The demonstration is concerning because many security professionals counsel end users to look for EV certificates when trying to tell if a site such as https://www.paypal.com is an authentic Web property rather than a fly-by-night look-alike page that's out to steal passwords. But as Carroll's page shows, EV certs can also be used to trick end users into thinking a page has connections to a trusted service or business when in fact no such connection exists. The false impression can be especially convincing when end users use Apple's Safari browser because it often strips out the domain name in the address bar, leaving only the name of the legal entity that obtained the EV certificate.
GymKit, a feature built into WatchOS 4.1, enables seamless tap-to-connect tech. It's like CarPlay, but for fitness machines. Apple announced GymKit as a feature for Apple Watch back in June at its WWDC keynote, promising it would arrive this year. It's just now becoming available.
I tried it, and it's great. But it's only rolling out at one North American gym at the moment, in New York: Life Time Athletic at Sky. It's coming to Equinox as well in 2018.
Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”
Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”
Pull up a simple Google search for “neighborhood” and “Waze,” and you’re bombarded with local news stories about similar once-calm side streets now the host of rush-hour jams and late-night speed demons. It’s not only annoying as hell, it’s a scenario ripe for accidents; among the top causes of accidents are driver distraction (say, by looking at an app), unfamiliarity with the street (say, because an app took you down a new side street), and an increase in overall traffic.
“The root cause is the use of routing apps,” says Bayen, “but over the last two to three years, there’s the second layer of ride-share apps.”
Ma Jun’s years as an environmental activist taught him one lesson: if you want factories to clean up their act, shaming them in front of Apple Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. works better than government fines.
Ma’s strategy -- backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. -- is to scrape real-time data off government websites that compile readings from effluent monitoring equipment at some 13,000 of the worst water polluters. The data is then aggregated on an app called Blue Map.
Apple today announced that it is working with the city of Chicago to bring coding opportunities to Chicago’s nearly 500,000 students through a citywide expansion of Apple’s Everyone Can Code program.
Starting this spring, Chicago Public Schools and City Colleges of Chicago will expand Everyone Can Code curriculum and materials to reach students citywide. For the first time, City Colleges of Chicago will offer the innovative App Development with Swift curriculum, helping students build skills around coding and app development.
Apple's been doing Hour of Code for a few of years now. Last year, the company introduced its Swift Playgrounds to the mix. With new and improved lessons to go with it, and the ability to control robots — yes, robots! — it makes the same kinds of code used to create next-generation iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps not just accessible to everyone, but relatable.
Every year I go to my local Apple Store to check out the Hour of Code sessions and I try to sit in on at least one. And every year, kids and adults alike began filing in a short time before the workshops began, their spaces reserved online over the course of the last week. Parents accompanied the younger children, helping them find stools around the large wooden tables. At one end, a TV set stands with the Hour of Code material displayed for the whole store to see.
A Reddit post has drawn a flurry of interest after an iPhone 6s owner reported that a battery replacement significantly increased the device's performance running iOS 11. The ensuing discussion thread, also picked up by readers in the MacRumors forum, has led to speculation that Apple intentionally slows down older phones to retain a full day's charge if the battery has degraded over time.
Apple has been addressing this in multiple ways, from systems-on-a-chip with both high-efficiency and high-performance cores, to machine learning-based power management. But lithium-ion batteries are lithium-ion batteries.
With older phones and those with poorer battery health, one of the ways seems to be prioritizing battery life over processor speed. That'll cause a hit to performance but still allows the iPhone to make it through the day.
Apple did not disclose the price but we have several sources that have confirmed to us that the deal is in the region of $400 million.
Sources also tell us that Apple’s deal had been in the works for about five months and came after Shazam had been in talks with others, including Snapchat and Spotify.
"Spotify has made the discovery of new music front and centre of what makes it a compelling proposition," said Mark Mulligan, from the consultancy Midia Research.
"Apple just doesn't have the same amount of data about listening tastes as Spotify, meaning it can't drive recommendations with as high a degree of accuracy and precision.
"Shazam essentially gives it a shortcut to having a massive database."
The report explains that the move to phase out music downloads has been in place since 2016, but in a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple denies the report and simply says “it’s not true.”
Apple has released a statement today sharing that it will be donating $1 million towards relief efforts for ongoing Southern California wildfires.
In letters to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last month, an attorney for the California computer maker argued at least four shareholder proposals relate to “ordinary business” and therefore can be left off the proxy Apple is expected to publish early next year, ahead of its annual meeting.
The attorney, Gene Levoff, cited guidance issued by the SEC on Nov. 1 saying that company boards are generally best positioned to decide if a resolution raises significant policy issues worth putting to a vote.
Apple is continuing its barrage of iPhone X advertisements today with three new ones hitting YouTube. The new videos each focus on a specific feature, including Portrait Lighting and Face ID.
Version 3.1.0 of Lightroom CC for iPad and iPhone both include intelligent new auto settings powered by Adobe’s machine learning technology, Sensei. Adobe says Sensei will analyze your photos and determine the best settings by cross referencing your image against tens of thousands of other professional shots.
The two new apps use such technologies like object recognition, person segmentation, stylization algorithms, and efficient image encoding/decoding.
An impostor app pretending to belong to MyEtherWallet.com has been removed from the App Store, but not before it managed to secure an ad and climb to third place in the store's Finance category over the weekend.
Apple on Monday announced a new App Store feature that allows developers to offer discounted introductory pricing or limited-time free trials on auto-renewable app subscriptions, a move designed to help subscription-based apps draw in new customers.
Developers can set release dates no more than 90 days in the future and no sooner than two days in the future. Of note, pre-orders are only supported for new applications, not existing apps.
Google this week released a proof of concept tool that allows security researchers, and other developers, to hack into iOS 11.1.2, software that could lead to a jailbreak for devices running that OS version.
Created by noted iOS bug hunter Ian Beer, the tool released on Monday takes advantage of an exploit called "tfp0," which has since been patched in Apple's latest iOS 11.2 release.
There’s a video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother on the internet. But it’s not really Gadot’s body, and it’s barely her own face. It’s an approximation, face-swapped to look like she’s performing in an existing incest-themed porn video.
The video was created with a machine learning algorithm, using easily accessible materials and open-source code that anyone with a working knowledge of deep learning algorithms could put together.
Traditionally, doctors use paper questionnaires to ask patients about their well-being, but these lengthy surveys can be burdensome for cancer patients to fill out and, on top of that, may be inaccurate. Wearable technology and emojis can make the self-reporting process easier, researchers announced this weekend in Atlanta at the American Society of Hematology’s annual meeting.
Researchers recruited 115 patients with two types of cancer (lymphoma or myeloma) and life expectancies of less than five years that also happened to own an iPhone5s. If selected for the study, they were given Apple Watches. Then, researchers used a special app to collect baseline health data — and to enable participants to use emojis to express their physical/emotional states through treatment. The study was created using Apple’s ResearchKit, described by Apple as a “software framework for apps that let medical researchers gather robust and meaningful data.”
An app masquerading as MyEtherWallet.com, one of the internet’s most popular services for storing ETH and other crypto coins, has made its way to the top of the iOS App Store charts.
The app rose to the number three spot in Finance category of the App Store this weekend as part of a bitcoin frenzy that saw bitcoin exchange Coinbase top Apple’s free download list in the U.S.. In this case, however, it is important to note this app is not official so users should avoid downloading it.
The tech is pretty simple. Tracking clients embed a line of code in the body of an email—usually in a 1x1 pixel image, so tiny it's invisible, but also in elements like hyperlinks and custom fonts. When a recipient opens the email, the tracking client recognizes that pixel has been downloaded, as well as where and on what device. Newsletter services, marketers, and advertisers have used the technique for years, to collect data about their open rates; major tech companies like Facebook and Twitter followed suit in their ongoing quest to profile and predict our behavior online.
But lately, a surprising—and growing—number of tracked emails are being sent not from corporations, but acquaintances. “We have been in touch with users that were tracked by their spouses, business partners, competitors,” says Florian Seroussi, the founder of OMC. “It's the wild, wild west out there.”
Apple’s Face ID isn’t perfect, but, in my experience, it’s more reliable than Touch ID. With Touch ID I’ve had to register and re-register fingers when prints stopped working and wet digits are never welcome. Yes, with Face ID I have to crane my neck when the phone is on the table and I must turn away from direct sunlight when I’m outside, but otherwise it works without ifs and buts. (I might re-do the Face ID setup to deal with the phone on the table situation so it recognizes the area below my chin, but I’m lazy: It works well enough and it successfully dealt with the black eye I earned in Maui’s breaking waves.)
More important, I saw how my spouse, a normal, non-geek user took to Face ID. Set up was much easier than Touch ID’s lengthy, detailed registering of fingers. As my spouse’s tech “chauffeur”, I hear about it when things fail to obey; I have yet to hear a discouraging word about Face ID.
This is an app you need to know about because if it's right for you, it will transform how you use your Mac. It can radically transform it by turning complex jobs into a single keystroke. It can remove repetitive chores entirely and it can make sure you don't forget steps in a job you only do once a month. The new Keyboard Maestro 8 is an update that brings more features and more ways to combine these tools.
CorelCAD 2018 offers dozens of new features, but important in this release is enhanced 3D solid modeling editing. Users can now save design time by utilizing enhanced EntityGrips and Properties palette. Also along the lines of 3D modeling is the new Helix tool, which allows users to create 2D spirals and 3D helixes. This new tool makes it simple for architects and designers to create objects like spiral staircases and the manufacturer of springs, screws, and bolts.
“We will definitely need drivers for the foreseeable future,” Peter Gigante, head of policy research at Lyft, said at a November conference. Eventually, a driver’s role could become one of aiding passengers who need extra assistance, such as seniors and children, he said. “The concerns (about job loss) are understood and valid, but I don’t think this is an immediate issue that requires big actions right now; we have a lot of time to understand what the role of the driver will be.”
So what are those roles?
Just as no one predicted that the horseless carriage would engender millions of jobs in everything from highway construction to drive-through fast-food chains, it’s hard to imagine what the advent of self-driving vehicles might spawn. But there are some inklings.
The problems that I face day-to-day are not problems that I will care about when I am on my deathbed. But if I do not solve these day-to-day problems, I will not get to the level where I can solve the problems that I do care about when I am on my deathbed.
Life.
Can't we do better?
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Thanks for reading.
A theme emerged when Apple’s director of artificial intelligence research outlined results from several of the company’s recent AI projects on the sidelines of a major conference Friday. Each involved giving software capabilities needed for self-driving cars.
Ruslan Salakhutdinov addressed roughly 200 AI experts who had signed up for a free lunch and peek at how Apple uses machine learning, a technique for analyzing large stockpiles of data. He discussed projects using data from cameras and other sensors to spot cars and pedestrians on urban streets, navigate in unfamiliar spaces, and build detailed 3-D maps of cities.
In celebration of the holiday season, Apple last night through a Beer Bash event with singer Gwen Stefani. Apple generally throws these concerts as a perk to employees and on a semi-annual basis.
For me, the biggest improvement in MarsEdit 4 is its light feel: it is now highly responsive, and I haven’t seen a single spinning beachball since upgrading. It’s like switching to a nippy text editor from a rather overweight page layout app, only you get to keep all the features, and gain plenty more.
Ultimately, the experience of using the Surface Precision Mouse with a Mac ends up being a mixed bag. A lack of any Mac-compatible software from Microsoft seems like an early oversight and a missed opportunity to sell the Surface Precision Mouse to more than just Windows users.
The mouse itself is comfortable, and while I found it connected to my Mac more reliably than Logitech’s MX Master series, I still experienced Bluetooth issues when I fired up my wireless headphones. Perhaps this has more to do with how the new 15″ MacBook Pro communicates with Bluetooth mice than it does the mice themselves (since I’ve had worse hiccups with the Logitech MX Master). If Apple’s vision for the future is to be truly wireless, they need to do a better job supporting third-party Bluetooth devices.
Regarding Face ID: "I think we’ve worked really hard to maintain the trust we have with users about how this information technology is and isn’t used. First of all, no Face ID data goes to third parties. So what you enroll with Face ID, what you use to unlock your phone, that's an algorithm that is created and encrypted by the Secure Enclave. No third party that uses the iPhone camera has your Face ID data. We did create an API so developers can use the cameras to track facial movements, to do things like wrap stickers on your face (like Snapchat, ed.) That’s different than Face ID. They don’t have all the acces that Face ID has for that.
Schiller stresses the separate guidelines and strict policies developers have to adhere in order to get acces to that facial data. "We thought ahead to the same concerns you raised. For example, developers must be clear in their user privacy policies that they are using face data and what they are doing with that. So that you know. You have a choice to make whether you want to do that or not. You are in control. And also, every application that want to use face data must go through a special level of app review. We look at them specifically to understand what they are using the data for and does the user understand that. So uphold developer to do the right job for customers and ultimately let the customer decide."
These may not be the most-used apps, to be sure, but for the niche audiences they serve – say, for example, customers of a local pizza place that would rather have its own app rather than paying the fees associated with being on a food ordering platform like Seamless/GrubHub or Uber Eats – they serve a useful purpose.
As one app builder put it, the decision to limit these small businesses’ ability to compete on the App Store is as if a web hosting company said that they would no longer allow web pages built with WordPress templates or those made using website wizards from services like Wix or Squarespace.
In February, months before the #MeToo movement erupted, I ran an experiment in which I sexually harassed Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Google Home to document how these digital personal servants—whose names and voices are already feminized—peddle stereotypes of female subservience, putting their “progressive” parent companies in a moral predicament.
Now, those findings are being cited in a petition on the social network Care2 asking Apple and Amazon to “reprogram their bots to push back against sexual harassment.” The petition already has nearly 8,000 of its targeted 10,000 signatures. It asks people to sign if they want to see Siri and Alexa push back on sexual harassment when it’s directed at them. “In this #MeToo moment, where sexual harassment may finally be being taken seriously society, we have a unique opportunity to develop AI in a way that creates a kinder world,” the petition reads.
If it wasn't announced in the title of the Red Brick Center's new art exhibition, "iShow," most viewers could not guess that all of the works hanging at the gallery were created on smartphones.
The show, which opened Thursday night, showcases new work by 10 local photographers who have used their iPhones to remarkably diverse ends with the use of apps and filters, creative editing and printing processes.
When you think of a computer coder or programmer, you probably don’t picture someone tapping an Apple iPad to guide a multi-colored ball of fuzz around the inside of a bright maze.
But this week, members of Jasper High School’s Advanced Placement Computer Science class showed first- and second-graders at Ireland Elementary and Fifth Street School that in its most basic form, coding can be an experience much more engaging than simply typing orders into a command prompt. Wednesday, it took the form of the video game app described above.
The good news for the targets of highly sophisticated cyberspies? There’s a practical fix for that audio espionage problem. The bad news: It requires some surgery.
No software setting can turn off a microphone such that a skilled hacker who controls your device can’t turn it back on. Instead, you can simply remove them, and then plug in an external microphone only when you truly need it.
Sources tell us that the company is close to acquiring Shazam, the popular app that lets people identify any song, TV show, film or advert in seconds, by listening to an audio clip or (in the case of, say, an ad) a visual fragment, and then takes you to content relevant to that search.
The Apple Pencil Case and Leather Sleeve for 10.5-inch iPad Pro are both available in a new Pink Fuchsia color shade. This is the same color that we’ve previously seen for Apple Watch bands and iPhone cases.
Simply head into the app, tap on the search icon in the upper-right corner, and type “let it snow.” You should then see snowflakes start to fall from the top of your display. Pretty cool, right? Shake your device to watch the snow move like a snow globe.
Building on its acquisition of machine learning and AI specialist Turi, Apple this week committed "Turi Create" to GitHub, a new machine learning framework designed to help developers build machine learning models that can be parlayed into apps running on its major operating systems.
A HomeKit vulnerability in the current version of iOS 11.2 has been demonstrated to 9to5Mac that allows unauthorized control of accessories including smart locks and garage door openers. Our understanding is Apple has rolled out a server-side fix that now prevent unauthorized access from occurring while limiting some functionality, and an update to iOS 11.2 coming next week will restore that full functionality.
My hope is that these missteps lead to an analysis of Apple’s internal processes that leads to changes that improve the quality of Apple’s software. I believe that Apple can effect that change if it wants to. It’s got the cash, it’s got the talent, and—quite frankly—it’s Apple. It can do it, if it’s got the will and if its structure allows it to. Those are big ifs, but... I want to believe. I hope is that this is something that can be mitigated and fixed by making changes to Apple’s processes.
So that’s my hope. Here’s my fear: That this stuff is what emerges from a ridiculous complex system from time to time, and that despite all analysis, it’s not really clear why they happened. Of course they’ll nail down the very specific issues that caused the bugs that emerged last week, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they can find the larger structural issues that caused these things to emerge, so that they can fix them.
But the Pacific has already racked up what might be the highest honor any design can receive in 2017: Its first customer was Jony Ive, Apple Inc.’s chief design officer. Ive is friends with Barber and Osgerby; during a social visit soon after they landed the Vitra commission, they sketched their early idea for him. Ive, as it happened, wasn’t finding any chairs he liked for Apple’s new 12,000-person headquarters designed by architect Norman Foster. “He looked, raised an eyebrow, and said, ‘That’s interesting,’ ” Osgerby recalls. Ive eventually ordered one for every office desk on campus, each fitted with a custom-made fabric in a serene, deep-sea blue.
In email notifications sent out to Brazilian customers on Thursday, Apple said it plans to transition iTunes pricing from U.S. dollars to the Brazilian real in 2018, offering potential savings on music, apps and more.
With this latest update, Apple has included one wholly brand new video of the Los Angeles skyline at night.
The Calm app is all about relaxing visuals and sounds (which can be adjusted to wood in the fireplace, flowing waters, evening crickets and more) to calm you down, and a choice of three tabs: music, meditate and sleep.
I am not interested in any smart-home internet-connected accessories (yet). Because if I can turn on or off stuff from the Internet, someone else probably can too.
But I will appreciate any help that I can get to not get that nagging feeling whenever we are out and my wife asks me, 'so, you've checked that the iron has been turned off, right?'
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My current project at work requires me to deal with Excel. Its many deviation from the published User Interface guidelines as well as all the 'quirks' (especially dealing with CSV files) frustrate me to no end.
And I'm using the app on its native motherland of Windows 10.
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Thanks for reading.
Apple has announced its Best of 2017 apps and games, this year utilizing the Today cards in the iOS 11 App Store to feature the winners. Apple says its app of the year for iPhone is Calm, a meditation and sleep app, and Splitter Critters is 2017’s iPhone game of the year. Apple says the title ‘radiates imagination and originality’.
For iPad, Apple has chosen Affinity Photo, the desktop-class photo editor, and the game Hidden Folks.
Understanding how people use their devices often helps in improving the user experience. However, accessing the data that provides such insights — for example, what users type on their keyboards and the websites they visit — can compromise user privacy. We develop a system architecture that enables learning at scale by leveraging local differential privacy, combined with existing privacy best practices. We design efficient and scalable local differentially private algorithms and provide rigorous analyses to demonstrate the tradeoffs among utility, privacy, server computation, and device bandwidth. Understanding the balance among these factors leads us to a successful practical deployment using local differential privacy. This deployment scales to hundreds of millions of users across a variety of use cases, such as identifying popular emojis, popular health data types, and media playback preferences in Safari.
The apps didn’t help me cope during or after this exceptional edge-case scenario. No one designs digital diaries with mass shootings in mind, and I wouldn’t expect them to. But most self-help and therapy apps still require a lot of personal accountability on the user’s part—a burden I’m not sure someone seeking a hand out of the confusion should be expected to bear.
For my own mental well-being, at least, I can’t wait to delete all of these apps. And maybe find a real-life therapist to talk to all of this about.
Of my four basic requirements, three suffered. The list of the shows I listened to was now incomplete. There was no longer a number denoting how many episodes of each show I had on the app. The list of unplayed episodes had melded into the list of played episodes.
[...]
The playback got glitchier, and some programs streamed really poorly. I couldn’t tell you why: I’m paid to think about what goes into a microphone, not diagnose what is, or isn’t, coming out of an earbud. But it was unmistakable: The Apple app could no longer consistently fire on demand.
Just as Apple exists in a competitive world, so do its critics. In the Apple opinion business, it pays to be an early responder, and there’s rarely a downside to sticking one’s neck out. Retractions are rare and life goes on.
So the best advice is — enjoy! This show has been playing for more than 20 years, and it won’t be closing anytime soon. Think of it as “fake news for the rest of us.”
Following the launch of Amazon Prime Video on Apple TV, Apple has increased its Twitter presence with a new account dedicated to all things Apple TV. The shift sees the old @iTunesMovies account rebrand with a new @AppleTV handle.
Michelle Lee, who has served as head of development for Jason Katims’ True Jack Prods. for the past 5 years, is leaving the Universal TV-based pod to join Apple’s Worldwide Video unit as a senior creative executive.
Apple has released the latest version of macOS High Sierra through the Mac App Store. macOS 10.13.2 “improves the stability, compatibility and security” of Macs, and specifically includes improvements to third party USB audio devices, VoiceOver and Preview, and Braille displays and Mail.
The biggest change, at least for iPhone buyers, is the option to bypass Apple's carrier preauthorization check when purchasing an AT&T, Verizon or Sprint handset at full price. Those who elect to skip authorization can activate the phone on their carrier's network when they receive it, speeding up the checkout process.
This phone is a workhorse, but between the OLED screen that saves some battery life, and its hyper-intelligent A11 Bionic chip that knows when to save energy, battery life simply has never been a problem.
The update doesn’t bring any notable new features, but Apple says it should include app and performance improvements.
The idea here is that the development team at Newton wanted to make a calendar app that is user-friendly, easy to access, and doesn't interrupt any emailing activities you've c>urrently got going on.
So, instead of folding it into the Newton Mail app, the developers decided to create a stand-alone calendar that works with the email app so you've got more customization and all you have to do is switch between apps, almost like switching from one tab to another (thank you iOS design).
ProtonMail, built around the encryption standard known as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), previously required users to use its own apps or webmail service. Now, users loyal to common mail clients Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook or anything else that supports IMAP and SMTP can run ProtonMail Bridge in the background to enable a ProtonMail account to play nice with one of those newly supported clients.
You know by now that you absolutely need a password manager. But you never get around to buying one. Let’s fix that right now with RememBear, a new password manager that’s easy to install and figure out. We tested it, and while we still prefer 1Password for most users, we recommend RememBear for beginners, especially during its free beta period.
US Congressman Ted Lieu has written to Apple to complain about a recent change in App Store rules which prohibits apps from being developed using ready-made templates.
Although spammers and fraudsters have turned to templates to make it quicker and easier to launch apps, the technique is also employed by smaller shops and restaurants, as well as community organisations such as sports clubs, schools and churches, who cannot afford to develop an app from scratch.
I am not holding out hopes that apps on the phone will be able to cure mental illness. What I am holding out hope is that apps, together with real human beings on both ends, will be able to help in curing mental illness.
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The last time I was using Apple’s Podcast app on iOS, it was still known as the iPod app (I thinK), I was syncing audios over via ITunes and USB cable, and I was using my own Applescripts to create and maintain a playlist of podcast episodes.
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Thanks for reading.
Right now, the extra space may not seem that generous — if you compare the visible area on an iPhone 8 Plus and on an iPhone X, you can see at best one extra line of text. Yet using a gesture instead of a visible button has the potential to open up more user-experience improvements in the designs to come — from Apple and from others.
Apple is in a unique position to push this kind of gesture-based innovation and could even go beyond that to create a standard vocabulary of gestures that can be used by other apps or phone manufacturers, because the Apple brand is so strong that people will put up with the hurdles of learning a new system and unlearning what they know for the sake of using its products.
After setting up Apple Pay Cash on iPhone with iOS 11.2, Apple Pay Cash becomes an option in watchOS 4.2 in the Messages app and Wallet app on Apple Watch. Apple Pay Cash also works with Siri.
In order to bring the Apple Pay Cash debit card to life, Apple has partnered with credit card provider Discover, whose Discover Debit service powers the virtual tap-to-pay card for money transfers and in-store purchases.
At long last, Amazon’s Prime Video application will be available today for the tvOS-powered Apple TV, as expected based on hints from the App Store. Apple originally teased the release back at WWDC, but both companies had gone quiet on a specific launch date until now. Search ‘Amazon Prime Video’ in the Apple TV App Store to find it.
I’ve learned that Apple has acquired Pop Up Archive, the Oakland-based online platform focused on building tools to transcribe, organize, and search audio files. Among its suite of tools was the podcast search engine Audiosear.ch, which wound down operations on November 28, presumably in the wake of closing the acquisition.
It is a marriage of traditional craftsmanship and advanced technology that makes China's supply chain assets desirable, not pricing, according to Cook.
"There's a confusion about China," Cook said. "The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor costs. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country years ago. That is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view, the reason is because of the skill."
[...]
"The thing that's missing in our society is there's not enough people that want to listen and understand and participate," Cook said. "They have a litmus test of, 'Do I agree with every single thing that person believes, and if not I don't want to talk to them and they're a bad person.' I've never seen the world that way."
“My hope over time is that some of the things, the couple of things that’s been pulled, come back. I have great hope on that and great optimism on that,” Cook said, adding that he always tries to find areas to work together and if he gets criticized for that, so be it.
While Cook is right that “nothing ever changes from the sidelines,” it is hard to imagine China relaxing its stance on web censorship given all that has happened.
The reality is that Apple had little choice but to follow Beijing’s line in order to continue to do business in the lucrative Chinese market, but statements like Cook’s today are dangerous because they massively underplay the severity of the situation.
"These are modern teams that work with mobile, work with messaging," Petschingg told Business Insider. "They're out doing customer research, they've got their brand studio, they have their analytics team trying to optimize the software. Is that all going to go into PowerPoint?"
"It's a really interesting flip on making your workplace much more transparent, in a good way," he continued. "It's not like that situation where people who are doing the work also have to spend time pitching the work. That part sucks — just do the work, and make sure people can discover it. That's what Paste does."
Among the long list of updates to version 4 of MarsEdit are several modifications to the app’s editor. Common formatting options like bold, italics, and underlining are easily accessed from a formatting bar. A new typewriter view option keeps text centered in the middle of the editor as you type. If you edit in rich text mode, MarsEdit also lets users resize images by direct manipulation, and the app’s previewer has added MultiMarkdown support.
For WordPress users, MarsEdit has added support for featured images in posts, post formats, and author editing. Modern macOS features like versions for local drafts, auto-saving, and application sandboxing for security have been incorporated too. For link bloggers, MarsEdit has a Safari extension that sends highlighted text to the app as a block quote along with the article title and URL.
The new version will still feel familiar if you already know the app and all of the revisions and improvements maintain the software's core aim. Mind mapping in general is about getting the cacophony of ideas in your head down into a visual form where you can add to them, revise them, develop them.
MindNode in particular is about getting you to do that without having to think about the software, without having to study which tools do which jobs.
Before I talk about how easy this latest version of Notion was to use (some notation software is not), there is one standout feature I discovered quickly that will bring a smile to any arranger, music student, or songwriter’s face. That is the quality sampled sounds that come with the package. If you are doing your music or lots of scores for other writers, this will make your efforts much more enjoyable. If you are doing arrangements, you can actually hear the sounds of the instruments you are scoring for. From sounds of the London Symphony Orchestra to stellar Steinway piano samples to the sounds of virtuoso bassist, Victor Wooten, playback quality of Notion 6 alone makes this software worth the investment and a whole lot more.
Apple today is introducing a new way for app developers to acquire users for their apps: it’s launching a pay-per-install advertising product called Search Ads Basic. The “basic” branding signals that this product is being aimed at smaller developers compared with the existing Search Ads product, which is now being renamed to Search Ads Advanced.
Music writing serves a number of purposes: storytelling, criticism, discovery. Spotify has already established itself as a competitive force of “discovery,” and it soon plans to produce more of its own (surely branded) “storytelling” and original content. With this in mind, and when I worry over the publications, labels, and artists who have (reluctantly or otherwise) embraced Spotify, I can’t help but think of that airport restaurant server who teaches you how to use the iPad, thereby contributing to her own obsolescence. Why is the music press generating value for a platform that in every way plans to eliminate it? And what will become of music criticism in a world without records? Will publications review discovery feeds and write profiles of playlists? What good will criticism be when all of music has coalesced into algorithmically preordained Muzak?
After I watch a movie, I typically will go read the corresponding entry on IMDB. And, if the movie is old enough, I will also go read what Mr Roger Ebert thought about the movie.
I will be delighted if I can also go to, say, Apple Podcast, search and listen to podcast episodes that discussed the movie.
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I'm wondering if there is someone in Redmond, looking at the success of iPhone X, will now try to get rid of the Start button, again.
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Thanks for reading.
Both sender and recipient need to have Apple Pay Cash configured for the feature to work. If the recipient has not yet enabled it, the iMessage app will display an eror, saying the user "cannot receive payments sent with Apple Pay at this time."
Apple partners with a company called Brightstar for this exchange program and payouts range from $50 to $175. The process is rather simple and just like trading in a smartphone anywhere else.
tvOS 11.2 brings a new Sports section to the dedicated TV app, which offers up access to live sports games through integration with the ESPN app. The Sports app can be accessed through a new "Sports" tab at the bottom of the app, and it offers up custom content based on team preferences and current sports seasons.
Christopherson downloaded 75 apps on the first day she looked into helping Ethan this way, trying to find something that would work; she really wanted Ethan to keep playing.
Because of the discovery, Ethan was able to join the band again! Christopherson said how the new method was “exactly the same as his classmates, just a different mode.” It was like he had never left, and she certainly didn’t want to make Ethan feel any different because of it.
That's why experts repeatedly warn people that it's not a good idea or habit to swipe away apps. And that's starting to become clear in the way the phones are being designed.
The latest reminder and confirmation that the behaviour isn't helpful is in how Apple designed the iPhone X to work. It subtly made it far more difficult to swipe away apps and shut them – apparently so that people will feel less compelled to do so.
I’d argue that it’s not so much that Apple has lost the video platform battle to YouTube, but that the open web has lost the battle. Apple has never attempted to create a rival service to YouTube. Prior to its embrace of YouTube, what Apple used to do was publish video content on its website, using the HTML5 <video> tag.
Is that archival standard preservation? Probably not, no. But it's a practical method to ensure that this software can be enjoyed again by my fellow enthusiast with almost no effort whatsoever, and that's what floats my boat!
More than a year after the EU order, Dublin’s slow pace in recovering the money has landed it in court. Ireland is now seeking an investment manager and a custodian to operate the account and expects to appoint both next month.
“We have now reached agreement with Apple in relation to the principles and operation of the escrow fund,” Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe told reporters before a meeting with European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.
“Cook’s appearance lends credibility to a state that aggressively censors the internet, throws people in jail for being critical about social ills, and is building artificial intelligence systems that monitors everyone and targets dissent,” Maya Wang at Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong wrote in an email.
“The version of cyberspace the Chinese government is building is a decidedly dystopian one, and I don’t think anyone would want to share in this ‘common future.’ Apple should have spoken out against it, not endorsed it.”
Apple's SIM-free models support both GSM and CDMA networks, making the device a prime candidate for frequent travelers or customers who constantly jump networks. Being an unlocked model allows for later activation on any telco that supports iPhone.
The company quietly made the Apple Watch Sport band available in new color choices, while the color lineup for the iPhone X’s Silicone Case was also slightly expanded.
Anker’s Karapax Touch is the epitome of what a great case should be. We know from years of feedback from readers, Wirecutter staff, and family and friends that most people want a case that’s slim, plainly designed, reliably protective, and inexpensive. The Karapax Touch is exactly that—it’s a simple case that hits all the right notes.
The docking station allows you to connect a monitor, hard drives, printer, smart phone, headphones, speakers, headsets, tablet, etc. The MacBook can be used open or closed while it's locked in the docking station.
An autonomous train is barreling down the tracks, its cameras constantly scanning for signs that indicate things like how fast it should be going. It sees one that appears to require it to increase its speed–and so it does. A few heartbeats later, the train narrowly avoids a derailment. Later, when a human investigator inspects the sign in question, they see something different–a warning to slow down, not speed up.
It’s an extreme rhetorical, but it illustrates one of the biggest challenges facing machine learning today. Neural networks are only as good as the information they’re trained on, which had led to high-profile examples of how susceptible they are to bad data riddled with bias. But these technologies are also vulnerable to another kind of weakness known as “adversarial examples.” An adversarial example occurs when a neural net identifies an image as one thing–while any person looking at it sees something else.
Living in a city for (almost) the entirety of my life, I am used to hear sounds and noises constantly. Our family's flat is next to a semi-major road in our town, so I continue to hear the occasional vehicle noise throughout the night, even with the windows closed. And given the 'open-office' culture-virus that permeates companies here in Singapore, I am not expecting noise reduction to be part of my working life anytime soon.
And then, thanks to many people working on many different things, we have a healthy audio-ecosystem on my iPhone. I regularly have four different audio sources to accompany me: audio-books, podcasts, Apple Music, and BBC. And I can replace (almost) every minute of useless noises with useful sounds. Some I do pay full attention to the text, while other times they serve as background noise to mask the real background noise.
Side benefit: Covering up my bad thoughts too.
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I also haven't seen any real stars in years, too. (Well, except, you know, the Sun.)
Maybe there should be an AR app that puts the stars back.
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Some people will squeeze stress balls when they are stressed out or tired or bored. Other people will spn fidget-sinners.
Me? I do 3D-touch on my iPhone.
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Thanks for reading.
We take it for granted these days, but it’s amazing when you step back and reflect that what you have in your pocket is a device capable of fulfilling the complete photography journey. From planning your shot, to shooting it, post-processing it, and then to sharing or printing it - it’s all right there at the palm of your hand.
It's no surprise that kids are using technology at a pretty young age these days, and a key part of that is using it to communicate with friends and family. But most kids tend to use tablets or iPod Touches that don't have phone numbers, so normal texting and video chats are a no-go (unless it's with mommy's phone, which isn't always great for mommy). Sure you could use an app like FaceTime or Hangouts, but most of them don't offer the kind of control that parents want, especially for really young kids. Facebook, however, has come up with a solution. It's called Messenger Kids and yes, it's basically a standalone child-friendly Messenger app with parental controls baked right in.
Before you balk at the idea of having to sign your kid up on Facebook, don't worry -- you won't have to. In fact, your kid doesn't need a Facebook account at all in order to use Messenger Kids. You, however, do. That's because it uses the parent's Facebook account to set up the child's Messenger Kids account.
Protestors outside the Apple Store on Boylston Street made their voices heard about the Republican tax reform legislation which the Senate narrowly passed early Saturday morning.
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“It gives an enormous tax cut to Apple Verizon and Bank of America, GE and other corporations who don’t have to pay their taxes because they hide their profits off shore,” one man shouted.
I have two simple rules for an app to be on my iPhone's home screen.
1) I need to launch the app more than once a day, or
2) I may not need to launch the app more than once a day, but if I want to launch the app, I want to launch the app real fast.
All other apps goes into one of the folders on my home screen.
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Thanks for reading.
In most cases, simply turning off the iPhone X and turning it back on again will make Face ID activate successfully. It is reassuring that this is not a persistent issue.
"I can't imagine another time in the future that we get to try to make something that is for us, not in any indulgent, ghastly, selfish way, but we make it for us to try and help us do better. To make better products. To be able to easily collaborate and bump into other people," Ive said in the interview at the Hirshhorn Museum. He continued: "And we spend a lot of time there, we spend more time than in our own homes."
That's not to say that Ive, who is one of the most powerful people at Apple, isn't open to constructive criticism. He just doesn't want to hear any about the new campus.
The members from Attac, a group that seeks alternatives to unbridled globalisation, invaded the expansive two-level store near the Paris Opera for several hours -- leaving only after they were assured of a meeting with management.
"One hundred Attac activists occupied the Apple store" to demand the company "pay its fair share of taxes in the country in which it really operates," spokeswoman Aurelie Trouve said.
Apple Inc’s chief executive Tim Cook said developers using its platform in China number 1.8 million and have earned a total 112 billion yuan ($16.93 billion), representing roughly a quarter of total global App Store earnings.
Cook shared the data on Sunday during a speech at China’s top public cyber policy forum, organized by the Cybersecurity Administration of China (CAC), which oversees internet regulation including censorship.
“The theme of this conference -- developing a digital economy for openness and shared benefits -- is a vision we at Apple share,” Cook said. “We are proud to have worked alongside many of our partners in China to help build a community that will join a common future in cyberspace."
Cook’s comments come at a pivotal point for the company’s future in China, which is now its biggest market outside of North America. It relies on the sale of hardware and services in the world’s most populated country to propel revenue and profit growth. But the efforts required to stay in China’s good graces are causing tensions with civil libertarians and politicians at home.
Eventually, most people who were publishing on the web said they didn’t want to do anything to risk diminishing their Google ranking, and our team had pretty much no choice but to switch to letting people publish web addresses using dashes. I genuinely felt like we had caved in. Caring so much about a single punctuation mark was, of course, an absurd hill to die on, but having Google coerce us into changing our software, and our aesthetics, felt like the first step toward a slippery slope of further concessions.
But the truth was even worse. Despite my misgivings about Google, I didn’t notice a more nefarious pattern that was established at the same time. A whole community had formed around trying to guess how Google’s algorithm worked, and that community very quickly built an entire infrastructure around reverse-engineering the algorithms that drive attention and popularity on the web.
Google was teaching us that the way to win on the web is to game the algorithms of big companies.
Apple is taking the highly unusual step of releasing a significant iOS update today, just hours after an iOS 11 bug started crashing iPhones. A bug in iOS 11.1.2 started causing iPhones to crash if third-party apps use recurring notifications for things like reminders. iOS is releasing iOS 11.2 today, which addresses the issue and includes a number of new features. Apple usually releases iOS updates on a Tuesday.
If you have an App Store app installed that sends local notifications, once you hit December 2, 2017 local time, your iPhone could begin to crash.
When ST visited the Apple Store at 4pm, there were about 50 people there seeking help for the bug. Customers were speaking to Apple staff in batches of 10 to get their phones fixed.
Those who had not yet upgraded their operating system from the original version of High Sierra, 10.13.0, to the most recent version, 10.13.1, but had downloaded the patch, say the "root" bug reappears when they install the most recent macOS system update. And worse, two of those Mac users say they've also tried re-installing Apple's security patch after that upgrade, only to find that the "root" problem still persists until they reboot their computer, with no warning that a reboot is necessary.
Ergin explained that his colleagues reported the flaw to Apple on November 23 and noticed that it had been discussed in the Apple Developer Forum as far back as November 13. “It seemed like the issue had been revealed, but Apple had not noticed yet.”
Ergin didn't tweet about the flaw until five days later, on November 28. Regardless of whether five days is enough to qualify as responsible disclosure, Ergin’s intent in tweeting was well intended. “The issue was very serious. It has already been mentioned in forums and revealed publicly few weeks ago,” he wrote on Medium. “I have no intention to harm Apple and Apple users. By posting the tweet, I just wanted to warn Apple and say ‘there is a serious security issue in High Sierra, be aware of it and fix it’.”
Once an intruder gains access to the user’s iPhone and knows (or recovers) the passcode, there is no single extra layer of protection left. Everything (and I mean, everything) is now completely exposed. Local backups, the keychain, iCloud lock, Apple account password, cloud backups and photos, passwords from the iCloud Keychain, call logs, location data, browsing history, browser tabs and even the user’s original Apple ID password are quickly exposed. The intruder gains control over the user’s other Apple devices registered on the same Apple account, having the ability to remotely erase or lock those devices. Finally, regaining control over hijacked account is made difficult as even the trusted phone number can be replaced.
This is just scary. Why Apple decided to get rid of the system that used to deliver a seemingly perfect balance between security and convenience is beyond us.
If you're at all concerned about passcode as an attack vector, switch from a 6-digit passcode to a strong alphanumeric password. You can do that in Settings > Passcode > Change Passcode > Passcode Options > Custom Alphanumeric Code.
[...]
I'd love to see an option to turn off passcode as a reset vector for those of us who don't want or need it, but then again, I use a password so I probably wouldn't want or need that setting anyway. And that's how these loops begin.
For now, iOS 11 is doing a good job making sure people don't lose access to their data while providing alphanumeric password and MDM options for those of us who want to make sure our data is better protected as well.
Federighi's response was essentially a "not right now, but maybe eventually," pointing out that even Touch ID wasn't meant for more than one person to use.
The 14-second spots are part of a series called "The Gift of Go," each ending with someone unwrapping a Watch.
I don't wear tight jeans — and I never will — and yet something strange keeps happening during my bus ride to and from New York City: Siri sometimes comes on when I just shift in my seat.
At first, I didn't realize what was happening. But then I figured out that the iPhone X's side button was brushing up against my leg. Formerly the power button (on other iPhone models), the side button on the iPhone X activates Siri with a long press.
"This app is a completely new play from LEGO, mixing the physical and digital," says Tom Donaldson, VP of the Creative Play Lab at the LEGO Group. "You hold an iPhone or an iPad in your hand, and you can see your surroundings on the screen — your room, your table, that sort of thing. It can sense surfaces, and you can place virtual LEGO models into your real world."
Donaldson explains it's not only an overlay, but a 3D model that understands the real-world scene children have placed it in.
The battery on this machine has really changed how I develop. Not watching the battery power through the day is surprisingly liberating.
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In reality, the MacBook works extremely well. iOS, macOS, server and even Android development works just fine. Using both Xcode and Android Studio simultaneously offers no problem for the MacBook.
I suspect the upgrade to 16GB of ram really did the trick.
Apple’s Developer site has today shared a reminder that starting January 1st, 2018 32-bit Mac apps will no longer be accepted.
It's now 9pm on Dec 2nd while I am writing this. So far, it doesn't seem like any of the iPhones here in my family was affected by the iOS bug. I hope there isn't a nasty surprise waiting for me tomorrow. In particular, I need to wake up early, and I hope there isn't an alarm-clock bug waiting for me tomorrow morning.
(Come to think of it, I don't have a backup for waking-up-in-the-morning alarm-clock system.)
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Thanks for reading.
What I would say is, when you start measuring the human body, it's really interesting and difficult. Engineers, we often solve difficult problems -- really challenging problems -- but at least the electrons flow the same way every time. And the human body is this constantly changing thing. And so I think there are plenty of challenges but there's still opportunity.
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We think the right place for the health information to exist is with the person on their device. And we believe from a privacy standpoint, that where that information gets shared should be -- should be completely up to the individual. There's nothing more personal than your health information. And so we view that as the future. It's really unfortunate that today, uh, the pieces of your medical record and history are spread and sitting in servers of various companies around the world, and it ought to be sitting on the device that you carry every day. And so, that we view as the future.
Apple, in conjunction with Stanford Health, has launched the Apple Heart Study app, a first-of-its-kind research study using the Apple Watch heart rate sensor system to collect data on irregular heart rhythms and proactively notify users who may be experiencing atrial fibrillation.
I think an iOS laptop would be an appealing product for some users. It wouldn’t be for everyone, but as iOS continues to grow and evolve, it could be a pretty awesome product for people who are comfortable with the shape of a laptop, but the simplicity of iOS.
Will it happen? I feel like further Apple experimentation in iOS hardware is inevitable—but I certainly wouldn’t put money on it appearing in 2018.
It’s as plain as day: Apple Park is an enclave for a company that wants us to gape, but not get too close. We’re invited to buy its products, or ponder the shimmering aluminum model, but not to set foot within the sacred grounds.
This is Apple’s right — gated campuses are nothing new. What’s strange is to create a destination that’s little more than a tease, a vantage point from which to contemplate a sealed-off landscape for a hermetically sealed HQ.
The tiny object in front of Jeroen in the title image is, in fact, a working Macintosh Plus that he built. Recreating mid-80’s technology using 2017 parts seems like it would be easy, and while it’s obviously easier than breaking the laws of physics to go the other direction, Jeroen faced some serious challenges along the way, which he goes into some detail about in his talk.
Despite some small caveats, Apple has rewarded my faith at every step. I originally signed up for the iPhone Upgrade Program with the hope that the company would allow trade-ins by mail the following year, and that came to pass. Over the next few years, I anticipate the iPhone Upgrade Program will become Apple’s preferred way to sell iPhones, and those customers will be incentivized to buy directly from Apple. For serious Apple fans who want the latest iPhone every year without a large up-front payment, it’s the best choice.
If you ever work on projects or presentation as part of a group, the newest app by FiftyThree aims to make your experience effortless, mobile-friendly, and absolutely gorgeous. Paste by FiftyThree (hereby referred to as Paste) is a work collaboration app that allows you to create slides and share them with your team via Slack all in a matter of seconds.
In short, Sleep Cycle is an alarm clock that aims to track your sleep and wake you up in a more peaceful and less abrupt manner, allowing you to feel less tired and more alert when you hear the alarm going off in the morning. How does it do this? With a little bit of science of course!
Now, CARROT Weather on the Apple Watch truly looks like a little brother to its iOS counterpart, with colorful icons, bolder fonts for important interface elements, and familiar design mechanics. The main interface of the Watch app can be customized in several useful ways.
Look, I know: having the takeaway about Hillary Clinton from the DNC email hack being “I’d like to emulate her email style” is supremely fucked up, but that’s where my priorities lie. I’m like a dumb dog who only cares about what’s in front of my face, and that isn’t who’s president. It’s what the red number on my mail app is.
Let’s call this “boss email”. It’s defined by nearly immediate — but short and terse — replies. The classic two-word email. For underlings, it can be inscrutable. Is that an angry “thanks” or a grateful “thanks”? Does “please update me” imply impatience with you? Boss email can be the workplace equivalent of getting a “k” text reply from a Tinder date.
It's a newer wrinkle in a much older question—how is technology shaping our relationship with death?—and an emerging field of scholars have already devoted themselves to studying it. Preliminary research suggests consistent posthumous communication in fact can have a positive influence on recipients coming to terms with loss.
Debra Bassett, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warwick who researches the impacts of death in the digital world, believes that posthumous messages can help their recipients return to a place of grief when they need it most. In general, “most people that I have researched are finding these things a comfort,” Bassett said.
When I am dead, I'll stay dead. I don't want to burden anyone with any messages from the dead. I don't even want to burden anyone with any memories of me.
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Thanks for reading.