For many years now, iOS has offered an option in the Passcode section of the Settings all: “Erase all data on this iPhone after 10 failed passcode attempts.”
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I had no idea until I looked into it last weekend, but it turns out this feature is far more clever than I realized, and it’s highly unlikely that your kids or jackass drinking buddies could ever trigger it.
For the past four years I’ve been experimenting with smartphone film production. I recently shot and directed Missed Call, the first short film to be shot on an iPhone X. As the camera technology on each new generation evolves, many directors have begun to experiment with smartphone filmmaking. In 2015, Sean Baker’s Tangerine was shot on an iPhone 5. And Stephen Soderbergh’s 2018 film Unsane was shot on the iPhone 7.
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Squaring the circle of being both filmmaker and parent, made this one of the most challenging films I’ve ever made. Filming my son, talking about his dad and the often difficult discoveries we made along the way was hard. What helped, however, was the intimacy and spontaneity of shooting with an iPhone. Here’s what I learned.
Working with other industry leaders, including Microsoft, Apple has helped develop a new standard for braille displays. It was announced by the non-profit USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) with the goal of making it easier for blind users to use computers.
The new USB Human Interface Device (HID) standard also removes the need for specialized or custom drivers. In addition, it should make it easier for developers to create software which works across various platforms.
Apple engineers have been working on an initiative dubbed Digital Health, a series of tools to help users monitor how much time they spend on their devices and inside of certain applications. These details will be bundled into a menu inside of the Settings app in iOS 12, the likely name of Apple’s refreshed mobile operating system, according to people familiar with the plans.
When I first heard about the significant changes coming with version 3, I worried that OmniFocus was in jeopardy of losing touch with its essential essence. With an app as robust as OmniFocus, change for the sake of change and not necessarily improvement is bad. Spending time with OmniFocus 3 throughout the beta, I'm happy to report that is not a problem. The changes made to version 3 all seem to simultaneously focus on making the application more natural to use while at the same time adding even more power. Version 3 is an improvement over version 2 without sacrificing the things I loved about version 2 like easy capture, review mode, custom perspectives and all of the rest of the OmniFocus goodness.
After seeing the sun set over and over again, it remains to be the sacred moment of the day that touches people worldwide. The sunset in Ramadan is even more special marking an important symbol when everything changes. It is the time when fasting becomes feasting, and companionship of loved ones takes centre stage.
To celebrate this month, local photographer, Hattan Ahmed, set out to capture the magic of the last light through the lens of his iPhone. On his journey, he shares his tips to shooting the stunning vibrant sky during sunset.
“At some point,” Joswiak told Buzzfeed two years ago, “we’re all going to look back at the furor over the headphone jack and wonder what the big deal was.” He’s right; it’s not a big deal. It’s just Dongle. This is what power does to those without. They want their company to be either become normal or just barely irritating that to complain about it would seem silly. Dongle is death by a thousand free cuts — luckily I’m only on my sixth.
Predictive algorithms are increasingly central to our lives. They determine everything from what ads we see on the Internet, to whether we are flagged for increased security screening at the airport, to our medical diagnoses and credit scores. They lie behind two of the most powerful products of the digital information age: Google Search and Facebook’s Newsfeed. In many respects, machine-learning algorithms are a boon to humanity; they can map epidemics, reduce energy consumption, perform speech recognition, and predict what shows you might like on Netflix. In other respects, they are troubling. Facebook uses AI algorithms to discern the mental and emotional states of its users. While Mark Zuckerberg emphasizes the application of this technique to suicide prevention, opportunities for optimizing advertising may provide the stronger commercial incentive.
In many cases, even the developers of algorithms that employ deep learning techniques cannot fully explain how they produce their results. The German startup SearchInk has programmed a handwriting recognition algorithm that can predict with 80 percent accuracy whether a sample was penned by a man or woman. The data scientists who invented it do not know precisely how it does this. The same is true of the much-criticized “gay faces” algorithm, which can, according to its Stanford University creators, distinguish the faces of homosexual and heterosexual men with 81 percent accuracy. They have only a hypothesis about what correlations the algorithm might be finding in photos (narrower jaws and longer noses, possibly).
I missed the days when I can just browse through the menu items in the menu bar to figure out how to do things in a piece of software.
Now, in web apps and (to a lesser extend) iOS apps, I have to hunt all over the place just to figure out how to do things.
And I've never been comfortable with Microsoft's ribbon interface either.
I'm old.
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Thanks for reading.