It’s official: Apple will hold its next big event on September 12 at Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino. Apple issued media invites with the tagline ‘Gather round’ as a teaser today. While three new flagship iPhones and a redesigned Apple Watch are expected to be the star of the show, there are a lot of other products in the pipeline that could make an appearance at the big event.
Other details are still to be determined, but we can report with certainty that iPhone XS will be the name, the OLED model will come in two sizes including a larger version, and each will be offered in gold for the first time.
The biggest change is the all-new edge-to-edge display. Apple has been rumored to be working on ~15% bigger displays for both sizes of Apple Watch — that rumor has been confirmed in the images we’ve discovered. As expected, Apple has achieved this by dramatically reducing the bezel size around the watch display.
In addition to taking the display edge-to-edge, we’re also looking at a brand new watch face capable of showing way more information than the current faces offered. The analog watch face shows a total of eight complications around the time and within the clock hands.
iOS developer Guilherme Rambo has discovered that the pride Apple Watch face is “hardcoded to not show up if the paired iPhone is using the Russian locale.”
Many travelers consider their cellphones essential when they’re on the road and rely on it for taking pictures and texting to using it to find their way around.
So what do you do if your phone gets lost, stolen or breaks when you’re abroad? How can you prevent it from happening in the first place?
Granted, Siri has room to grow when it comes to helping manage and parse huge photo libraries, but I've only recently discovered how powerful Apple's digital assistant is at locating specific photos. Siri has saved me from tons of furious swiping through the Photos app to dig up an old photo before the person standing next to me loses interest.
Augmented reality kids app maker Osmo has teamed up with Disney for the first time to combine its reflective artificial intelligence system with hand-drawn art. You simply attach the Osmo mirror to an iPad and start the Osmo Super Studio app. The app shows an image of Mickey Mouse that the child can physically draw on a paper notepad in front of the iPad. The app digitizes that drawing and animates the child’s image, putting into motion the static picture in a seamless way.
Developers must include a link to their privacy policy in the metadata for their app, according to a new rule issued by Apple last night, one that extends the existing requirement for apps with subscriptions to all new apps and updates to exiting apps pushed to the App Store.
Future versions of Firefox will automatically block tracking codes placed by so-called third parties, advertisers or other firms that are not the website publisher; users won’t need to take any additional action. The feature is already being tested and is expected to be included in Firefox later this year. It will also block trackers that take too long to load. The features aren't designed to block ads, but may prevent some from being displayed, because the ads include tracking scripts that take too long to load.
All use embeddable maps from a third-party company called Mapbox. The company’s chief executive, Eric Gundersen, said in an interview the mishap was the “ugliest kind” of error.
Mapbox creates its maps using more than 130 different sets of data, including data from a map of the world called OpenStreetMap that is free to use and built by volunteers. One of the volunteers made more than 80 anti-Semitic or hate-oriented edits to locations around the world, including New York, Mr. Gundersen said.
While vacationing on the coast of Spain in 2012, the computer vision scientist Antonio Torralba noticed stray shadows on the wall of his hotel room that didn’t seem to have been cast by anything. Torralba eventually realized that the discolored patches of wall weren’t shadows at all, but rather a faint, upside-down image of the patio outside his window. The window was acting as a pinhole camera — the simplest kind of camera, in which light rays pass through a small opening and form an inverted image on the other side. The resulting image was barely perceptible on the light-drenched wall. But it struck Torralba that the world is suffused with visual information that our eyes fail to see.
“These images are hidden to us,” he said, “but they are all around us, all the time.”
The experience alerted him and his colleague, Bill Freeman, both professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to the ubiquity of “accidental cameras,” as they call them: windows, corners, houseplants and other common objects that create subtle images of their surroundings. These images, as much as 1,000 times dimmer than everything else, are typically invisible to the naked eye. “We figured out ways to pull out those images and make them visible,” Freeman explained.
XS? Really?
If so, chances are the "iPhone X" brand will not be around in 2019.
(The entry-level iPad went from 'iPad Air 2' to plain 'iPad'. That's including a change of name. I doubt Apple will execute a move from 'iPhone XS' back to 'iPhone X'.)
~
Thanks for reading.