After touting the electronic medical record (EMR) feature in its iOS 11.3 release, Apple said that – as of last week – 39 hospitals have signed up to test the software, which will allow patients and healthcare providers to interact on iPhones and iPads. Officials at two of those institutions, Johns Hopkins and Penn Medicine, see promise in how the field is evolving.
The push to easily and securely share health data is likely to continue growing over the next few years. By 2020, one in four patients is expected to be participating in a "BYOD" – bring your own data – healthcare scenario, according to research by IDC.
The Federal Trade Commission put six companies on notice today, telling them in a warning letter that their warranty practices violate federal law. If you buy a car with a warranty, take it a repair shop to fix it, then have to return the car to the manufacturer, the car company isn’t legally allowed to deny the return because you took your car to another shop. The same is true of any consumer device that costs more than $15, though many manufacturers want you to think otherwise.
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We asked the FTC for more information about the companies that it sent the letter to, but it would not say. It’s a safe bet that Sony and Microsoft are two of them, though—the Playstation 4 and Xbox One video game consoles both come with stickers that claim opening the device voids the warranty. Apple’s slick design precludes such stickers, but Apple Geniuses are trained to look for the signs of consumer meddling and will sometimes decline warranty service if it’s been repaired by an owner or third party (we’ve heard mixed things on this; customers have had many different experiences at Apple Stores. In any case, Apple does discourage people from having third parties fix their devices.)
A strong suite of decent apps and a seamless ecosystem have always been Apple’s strong suit, especially on tablets, and we’re starting to see that again with constant upgrades to ARKit and ClassKit apps, which are either designed for, or compatible with, education from the tablet.
We tested out several iOS 11 apps that are attempting to make learning both entertaining and fulfilling, often using augmented reality (AR) or the compatible Apple Pencil, seeing whether the new slew of apps could offer a better learning experience than a pen and paper (spoiler: they did).
If you want a head start on writing on an iPad with an Apple Pencil, then there’s no better place to start than Apple’s own Notes app. It’s not exactly packed with features: You can’t even adjust the stroke width for the included pen, highlighter, and pencil tools. In fact, true to Apple form, customization feels forbidden. All you can really do is choose between blank, lined, or gridded paper and write in black, blue, green, yellow, or red.
But Notes sometimes makes up for that lack of variety through convenience. Apple built Notes compatibility into the design of the iPad itself, so you can scribble a new handwritten note at any time by simply tapping the Apple Pencil on your iPad’s locked home screen. The selection tool is also impressive; more so than any other app I’ve used, Notes precisely selects the line of script you want to select, even when it’s piled on top of another jumble of squiggles. It’s kind of magical.
Despite some performance misgivings for more intense workloads, Atom’s price, functionality, and approachability when it comes to package management and settings make it our choice for the best text editor for macOS for most people. Backed by GitHub, Atom has a long life ahead, and the open source nature of the project mean that anyone can help make it better.
Keynote 4 for iOS lacks the polish I’d expect from a release version, especially with effectively no changes unique to the app, but all incorporating options are available across apps and between platforms. Apple needs to give more attention to Keynote, fix the missing image gallery features that it already added to the Mac version, and provide more general polish. It also needs to push Keynote forward with better and richer interactivity, something that should be expected this many years into its development.
Most notably, the app integrates with Final Cut Pro to simplify the workflow of creating a film and pushing it up to Vimeo.
Engineering students at Rice University designed an iPhone app to help patients with Parkinson’s disease overcome a symptom known as “freezing,” in which the legs temporarily refuse to follow the brain’s command to lift and move forward.
For many of these patients, visual, audio, or vibratory cues can help them overcome freezing. The app may be the most comprehensive way to provide those cues, the students say.
The latest watchOS beta, 4.3.1, introduces a new alert when launching original watchOS 1 WatchKit applications, hinting that such apps may be dropped entirely in watchOS 5.
One app that stood out was Froggipedia which lets students learn the anatomy of frogs on the iPad without having to dissect the real amphibian. “We started two months back on the app [Froggipedia] with the help of Apple App Accelerator team. They helped us design the beautiful and intuitive user interface, enable seamless integration of ARKit, ensure the pressure sensitivity of Apple Pencil was put to good use and how to do the unity development,” Capt KJS Brar, CEO, Designmate, told indianexpress.com. The app created by three-decade-old Ahmedabad-based animation house Designmate was first demonstrated at Apple’s education-focused event in Chicago last month.
Following today's testimony, a photo showing two pages of Zuckerberg's printed notes circulated around the web, revealing the CEO was prepared to delve into areas that went untouched during the hearing. Notably, the Facebook chief was ready to defend Facebook's business model in light of disparaging statements made by Apple CEO Tim Cook last month.
The first entry in a section titled "Tim Cook on biz model," apparently prepared in case Cook's comments were broached, Zuckerberg first refers to a quote from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. An abridged version of Bezos' remarks, made in reference to a recent Amazon Kindle release, the notes read, "Companies that work hard to charge you more and companies that work hard to charge you less." The missive is an apparent defense of Facebook's revenue model, which goes against the grain of traditional payments for products and services. Zuckerberg recited the same passage to Vox in an interview earlier this month.
There are talking points about Apple CEO Tim Cook’s recent critique of Facebook’s ad-targeting business model, many of which sounded a little like fighting words—like “Lots of stories about apps misusing Apple data, never seen Apple notify people” and “Important to hold everyone to the same standard.” Ouch!