Apple is working with Salesforce to improve how the customer relationship management platform works on iOS, including new features for the main Salesforce app and the introduction of tools for developers to build native iOS apps that use Salesforce's service.
Under the partnership, Salesforce will redesign its Salesforce Mobile app to provide customers "rich experiences on iOS" that take advantage of the operating system's unique features, including Siri ShortCuts, Face ID, and Business Chat. As part of the app push, Salesforce will also introduce its first ever Trailhead mobile app, with other iOS apps also planed to serve the specific customer needs of various industries and small businesses.
This time, though, Apple may have outsmarted itself. Because while a handful of gadget-makers, like Google and Nintendo, have pushed boldly into the USB-C future, the rest of the world still runs on good ol' reliable USB-A. If you want to plug in your existing mouse and keyboard into the MacBook Pro, you still need some kind of adapter, hub, or dongle. It's what gadget-heads have dubbed "dongle hell," as plugging in everyday accessories becomes a headache.
Indeed, the largest sign that USB-C just isn't quite ready for prime-time comes from Apple itself.
When an Israeli entrepreneur went into a meeting with the infamous spyware vendor NSO, company representatives asked him if it would be OK for them to demo their powerful and expensive spying software, known as Pegasus, on his own phone.
The entrepreneur, who spoke to Motherboard on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the meeting, agreed, but said that NSO would have to target his other iPhone, which he brought with him and had a foreign phone number. He gave NSO that phone number and put the phone on the desk.
After “five or seven minutes,” the contents of his phone’s screen appeared on a large display that was set up in the meeting room, all without him even clicking on a malicious link, he said.
This is a year’s worth of images I took of the moon using just my iPhone 7 through a telescope. The first time I tried it I was amazed by the detail and quality of shot that was possible on a phone, so I set about taking pictures at a various stages throughout the lunar cycle.
All devout Apple adherents must make a pilgrimage to the One Ring located at 1 Apple Park Way. In many ways the draw that the one ring had towards Bilbo and Frodo is quite similar to Apple loyalty and magnetic magic of desire when a new iPhone hits the stores. This LEGO model of the Apple Park may look quite simple, but it’s quite a feat in terms of scale and detail.
Apple doesn't go out of its way to highlight this, but unless your age is 65 or older when you set up your Watch and/or the iOS Health app, the feature is off by default. This is presumably because Apple's fall detection algorithms aren't infallible — on a support page, the company warns that physically active people are more likely to trigger false alarms. Those three sets of burpees could wreak havoc.
Over an iced chamomile tea at the midtown Radiance Tea House & Books, whose ambient noise level (sixty decibels) is not much louder than a coffee percolator’s, Gregory Scott Farber described the app he created, SoundPrint, as “Yelp for noise.” The free program allows users to search for and grade restaurants and bars according to their sound level. “Places are getting louder,” Farber, who is forty-two, said. “People tell me, thirty or forty years ago you could go somewhere to eat and expect to have a conversation.” A non-practicing lawyer who works as a research analyst, Farber suffers from permanent hearing loss, brought on by meningitis, which he contracted when he was a baby. Like so many great inventions, Farber’s arose from a desire to find love—or, at least, a place to take a date.
It’s not quite AirPower, but Belkin’s latest charging dock gives you a convenient way of charging up to three Apple devices simultaneously. The Boostup Wireless Charging Dock has a pair of elevated wireless charging pads to power your iPhone and Apple Watch, and a USB Type-A port for charging a third device, like an AirPods case.
The Chrome developers want me to believe that this is fine, since (phew!) I’m still protected by one additional consent guardrail. The problem here is obvious:
If you didn’t respect my lack of consent on the biggest user-facing privacy option in Chrome (and didn’t even notify me that you had stopped respecting it!) why should I trust any other consent option you give me? What stops you from changing your mind on that option in a few months, when we’ve all stopped paying attention?
It’s not a new idea. Red Hat generated $2.9 billion in revenue last year while giving away its flagship product, which is based on the Linux kernel and other open source software. Customers pay Red Hat for technical support and the comfort of a business relationship with the developers of software you depend on.
That doesn’t work as well for smaller open source projects that it would be hard to build a company around. And customers don't necessarily want to create contracts with dozens, or hundreds, of independent software developers.
Tidelift tries to solve this by gathering those developers under one umbrella. Customers pay Tidelift, and developers can focus on code instead of sales and marketing. "We couldn't understand why something like this didn't exist, so we created it," says Tidelift CEO Donald Fischer, a former executive at Red Hat who founded the company with other open source veterans.
Apple will pledge its support for federal privacy regulations during a Senate hearing this week, according to an executive’s prepared testimony obtained by Axios.
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Tribble, a longtime Apple employee who leads the company’s privacy engineering work, will "convey Apple’s support for comprehensive federal privacy legislation that reflects Apple’s long-held view that privacy is a fundamental human right" during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Wednesday.
Given the choice between USB-A and USB-C, Apple has, obviously, went ahead with USB-C. But, I suspect, the real choice Apple has made is not USB; rather, in Apple's world, everything should be wireless.
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I hope someone in Apple is working on solar-powered iPhones so that we can get rid of the Qi chargers someday.
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Thanks for reading.