MyAppleMenu

The One-Missing-Feature Edition Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Castro 3 Review: The Castro You’ve Always Wanted, by Ryan Christoffel, MacStories

If an absent feature ever kept you from sticking with Castro 2, that almost certainly won't be a problem anymore. Castro 3 addresses nearly all of those "one missing feature" requests in a single release.

Castro Podcasts, by Ben Brooks, The Brooks Review

Isn’t the entire point of a podcast that the entire podcast is relevant and entertaining?

Instagram Testing New ‘You’re All Caught Up’ Feature To Improve Digital Health, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

Once a user has seen all of the content their friends have shared in the last 48 hours, Instagram will display a new mid-feed banner that says there’s nothing left to see. “You’re all caught up, you’ve seen all new posts from the past 48 hours,” the notification reads.

Hospital Taps iPad-based Language Interpretation That Takes Half The Time Of Phone Calls, by Bill Siwicki, Healthcare IT News

Southcoast Health shows how video-based interpretation is improving patient engagement and experience, and allaying the fears of patients with limited English proficiency.

Stuff

Apple Cuts USB-C To Lightning Cable Price To $19, by Shannon Liao, The Verge

Apple has dropped the price of its USB-C to Lightning cable by $6 to $19; it previously sold for $25. The price cut comes amid rumors that this year’s iPhones could include a USB-C to Lightning cable in the box and finally move on from the old USB-A cable.

Apple Updates Clips With New Soccer Content Ahead Of FIFA World Cup, by Chance Miller, New Yorker

Apple touts that the update brings soccer graphics including an animated sticker, label, and poster with customizable text.

Evernote Adds Ability To Transcribe Voice-to-Text Notes Via AirPods, BeatsX, And More, by Mitchel Broussard, MacRumors

Note-taking app Evernote was updated over the weekend with a new feature that allows you to connect your Bluetooth headphones to the app and use them to record audio and transcribe voice-to-text notes. The company says that as long as the headphones have a microphone they will work, so if you own AirPods or BeatsX you'll be able to use the wireless earphones to quickly jot down notes and reminders using your voice and Evernote.

Procreate Pocket Receives Major 2.0 Update That’s Built From The Ground Up, by Jeff Benjamin, 9to5Mac

Procreate Pocket 2.0 features 136 handcrafted brushes, wet painting effects, new time-lapse features, brush imports and exports, and hundreds of additional features that will empower creatives on the go.

Develop

10 Ways To Take Beautiful Photos Of Kids, by Stella Blackmon, A Cup of Jo

Do you like taking family photos? Growing up, the only time my family took a real picture was for our annual holiday card. And 100% of the time, you could point out at least one sibling in the midst of a total meltdown. (For two years in a row, it was all three of us.) “Good enough,” I remember my mom saying. Why is getting kids to stand still — let alone to smile on command — so impossible? We asked four family photographers to share their secrets for getting joyful reactions from kids…

How Smarter Living Taught Me To Be An Adult, by Tim Herrera, New York Times

I’ve learned a lot in the last two years: how to actually manage my finances; how to eat better and stick with an exercise routine; how to say no effectively; and how to build good habits (and break bad ones), among many, many other things. Most meaningfully, I’ve learned how to find and focus on the things that truly matter to me and let the rest fade into the background. It’s a slight exaggeration to say that S.L. has taught me how to be an adult, but only just.

With that in mind, dear reader …

Notes

Animoji Go On A Wild Ride In Crazy K-pop iPhone X Ad, by Buster Hein, Cult of Mac

Apple has tapped into the power of K-pop for its wild new Animoji ad that came out today. The South Korean group HYUKOH gave Apple exclusive rights to their catchy new song for the fun ad that features a dazzling array of lights and animated cityscapes.

How The Math Men Overthrew The Mad Men, by Ken Auletta, New Yorker

Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men—the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence. Yet Math Men are beleaguered, as Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated when he humbled himself before Congress, in April. Math Men’s adoration of data—coupled with their truculence and an arrogant conviction that their “science” is nearly flawless—has aroused government anger, much as Microsoft did two decades ago.

The power of Math Men is awesome. Google and Facebook each has a market value exceeding the combined value of the six largest advertising and marketing holding companies. Together, they claim six out of every ten dollars spent on digital advertising, and nine out of ten new digital ad dollars. They have become more dominant in what is estimated to be an up to two-trillion-dollar annual global advertising and marketing business. Facebook alone generates more ad dollars than all of America’s newspapers, and Google has twice the ad revenues of Facebook.

Bottom of the Page

Any time someone starts to argue whether Apple is a hardware or a software company, I will lose interest in the argument real quickly. Apple builds computers, not hardware nor software.

~

Any time now, someone will start to argue whether Apple is a computer company, or a service company.

~

Thanks for reading.