MyAppleMenu

The Effort-Is-Lacking Edition Sunday, October 14, 2018

Apple Shares New Apple Watch Series 4 How To Videos For Workouts & Emergency SOS, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

Apple this weekend has shared a pair of short Apple Watch how to videos on its YouTube channel. The videos are relatively basic, covering the Workout application and using Emergency SOS mode.

Review: Apple Watch Nike+ Hardware Still Solid, But Nike's Software Is Lacking, by Vadim Yuryev, AppleInsider

The Apple Watch itself is still a 4.5 out of 5. The hardware is solid, the execution is excellent. The changes Apple has made as the product has evolved has focused the product into what it needs to be —and we've said this before.

However, Nike's part of the effort in software is lacking. It's not like the release of the Apple Watch Series 4 was a surprise, and the fact that the Nike complications and software are untouched is unacceptable.

Gaming Console

What Developers Say Apple Needs To Do To Make The Apple TV A Gaming Console, by Samuel Axon, Ars Technica

Most of the developers I spoke with seemed to believe the same thing I did when I reviewed the Apple TV: there's a lot of potential here for this to be the Apple gaming console that people have speculated about for years. But, they add, Apple just isn't trying hard enough to let consumers know what the TV can do or to make it easy for them to use the TV explicitly for gaming purposes.

There's another angle on all this too: Apple has begun working on a project called Marzipan, which would make developing apps that can be deployed to both macOS and iOS easier than it is today. From what we know about it so far, the relationship from a developer's point of view could be somewhat similar to that between tvOS and iOS now.

What Does ‘Time Well Spent’ Mean For Games Like ‘Candy Crush?’, by Peter Pachal, Mashable

I think, first of all Candy Crush is a great game; it's a fun game. But it's actually structured in a way that it does not require you to play for many hours in a row. It's exactly the opposite in fact. We structured the game in a way that it's easy to learn — you can play it in three minutes. Candy Crush now has more than 3,800 levels, but each level can be played over just three minutes. Because we think that the mobile experience is not one where you stay many hours on the device playing, but is one where we want you to be able to play in a short space of time — while you’re waiting for the bus, or you're in the underground, or you have a moment for yourself and you want just to relax. In fact, the model in which we started with the business model was: stopping the player from playing.

Stuff

These macOS Mojave Apps Will Help You Get The Most Out Of The Finder, by William Gallagher, AppleInsider

Use these tools and you can, for instance, have your shared Dropbox folder automatically delete files over a week old. Drag a file in to share with someone, give them a few days to get it, then delete it rather than taking up your Dropbox space.

Or when you have a giant job on, you can get your Mac to rename a thousand files in a moment. Then with a keystroke you can have the Mac tag one file or a thousand and make sure both tags and filenames are consistent so that you can find them again later.

One thing. None of this can be done with Apple's software, you need to buy third-party apps and they are not casual purchases. For what they do, they're cheap, but each one is extremely powerful. What we're going to do with them here doesn't even count as scratching the surface.

The iPhone’s New "Screen Time" Regulating Tool Is Here To Save You From Yourself, by Lauren Valenti, Vogue

And while society has a ways to go in fully coming to terms with this sobering truth, it's become enough of an acute issue that one of the driving forces behind it all saw the need for addressing it head-on. Enter: Apple’s "Screen Time,” a new iOS12 feature that not only creates a daily and weekly activity report showing the total time spent on each app, but also counts how many push notifications are received, and how often the phone is physically picked up. And once the reality of phone, and in turn, social media addiction inevitably sets in, a user can take back the reigns with the "App Limits" tool and control how much time they spend on certain apps by setting a limit. Users also have the option of restricting use of certain apps based on the time of day with "Downtime," a feature that blocks notifications by placing a badge over flagged apps.

Will Rise Of Shopping Apps For Marks & Spencer, Tesco And Sainsbury’s Signal The End Of The Supermarket Checkout Till?, by Ellie Cambridge, The Sun

M&S have become the latest to test out an app which would save shoppers having to go through a checkout to pay.

Develop

Getting Through App Review, by Jacob Eiting, Medium

Being a well rounded iOS developer means knowing how to work with App Review. The rarely useful, often infuriating process occurs at the end of the dev cycle when time and tempers are short. This combination makes any rejection at this stage costly and deflating.

However, we are not powerless. Below are some of the tricks I’ve picked up over the years that help to reduce avoidable rejections as well as some advice for dealing with rejections when they do happen.

Notes

You're About To Drown In Streaming Subscriptions, by Brian Barrett, Wired

The notion that streaming services might someday totally supplant the monolithic cable package has glittered on the horizon for years now. But as that future becomes increasingly the present, an uncomfortable reality has set in: There’s too much. To Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and HBO Now, add WarnerMedia, Disney, and Apple as omnibus, general interest streaming destinations. Investors have poured a billion dollars into something called Quibi, which has an unfortunate name but exclusive Guillermo del Toro content. And the niche options continue to proliferate as well, whether it’s DC Universe or College Humor. If we’re not at the breaking point yet, we’re surely about to find it.

What Next For Photography In The Age Of Instagram?, by Sean O'Hagan, The Guardian

In February this year, researchers from Alphabet Inc’s DeepMind division released thumbnail images of a range of everyday subjects: a dog, a butterfly, a hamburger and an ocean view. All were AI-generated images produced from scratch by an algorithm called BiGAN. All look disturbingly like real photographs. Sooner than we think, it will be impossible for the human eye to tell the difference between an AI-generated image and a real photograph. The future is already here and photography is the medium shaping it – and us – in ways that make all these anxieties about the meaning of photography seem almost irrelevant. And, in another way – against a backdrop of fake news, alternative facts, and artificial intelligence – more relevant than ever.

Bottom of the Page

I've easily adapted to having to swipe down from the top-right corner to get Control Centre on my iPad. Not a problem at all.

Now, my iPhone 6 (which I used mostly as a backup alarm clock and radio) is the only device where I have to swipe up from the bottom for Control Centre. Fortunately, I most don't need to use Control Centre on this device.

~

Thanks for reading.