Running from January 22 to February 7, Apple says its panel of eleven photography judges from around the world (including Phil Schiller), will select the ten winning photos to be featured on billboards in select cities, and Apple retail locations.
Apple’s announcement yesterday of a contest to find the ten best shot on iPhone photos has provoked debate about the company’s policy of not paying for any of the photos, even when they are used in global advertising campaigns.
The argument that Apple should pay seems obvious enough, but not everyone agrees.
A new law in Australia gives law enforcement authorities the power to compel tech-industry giants like Apple to create tools that would circumvent the encryption built into their products.
The law, the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018, applies only to tech products used or sold in Australia. But its impact could be global: If Apple were to build a so-called back door for iPhones sold in Australia, the authorities in other countries, including the United States, could force the company to use that same tool to assist their investigations.
A little more retail momentum for Apple Pay: Apple has announced another clutch of U.S. retailers will soon support its eponymous mobile payment tech — most notably discount retailer Target.
In the roughly four years since Apple launched its mobile payments service, Apple Pay, the company has managed to convince just about every major bank and retailer to let customers use their bank accounts to pay for things quickly through iPhones and Apple Watches.
Smartphones, it seems, have gotten weird. And they’re only going to get weirder in 2019. Our glass slabs will be punctuated by pop-out cameras, foldable displays, hole-punched notches, and invisible fingerprint sensors. These features will be marketed as innovations. Some will be innovative. Some will just be weird, in the way that tech inevitably feels forced when design decisions are borne out of a need to make mature products appear exciting and new.
Just look to foldable displays. The concept isn’t new, but Chinese display maker Royale kicked off the most recent hype cycle at the end of October when it debuted a 7.8-inch flexible display named FlexPai. A week later, electronics giant Samsung showed off its own concept for a folding phone, one that “fits neatly inside your pocket” and then unfurls into a 7.3-inch display. The company declined to share a timeline for when the concept phone will be released, but Samsung’s annual flagship phone event is scheduled for next month, and it’s possible we’ll see more demos of the folding phone in addition to a new Galaxy smartphone.
In any event, if Apple does embrace folding-screen tech, the company will do so a little later than you'd expect. And it will do something unexpected that will make every one of its competitors wonder why it didn't think of that. I don't have any inside information to back that prediction up, but that kind of thing just keeps happening with Apple. It seems pretty likely that it'll continue happening.
Apple pushed software updates for macOS and iOS today. They are minor releases that simply offer a few bug fixes and security updates, with no new features—and there are no new features in any of the beta releases for these versions of the operating systems either.
Some MacBook Pro owners have complained of a ‘stage light’ effect, where they see uneven backlighting at the bottom of the display. For some, the symptom is only the first stage, with the backlight failing altogether.
Historically, language translation apps were confined to whatever developers could store in their on-board databases, limitations that were surpassed with internet connections and AI-assisted text recognition tools. Today, language teaching developer Rosetta Stone is taking the next step forward by adding augmented reality and machine learning to its iPhone app, enabling users to identify and translate the names of real-world objects — the first time object recognition technology has been used in a language app in this manner.
For several years now Apple has offered Phased Rollouts for app updates in the App Store. This lets you slow down the adoption of a new update to your users by limiting the number of users who are offered it as an automatic update each day.
This is useful for when you are releasing a ‘high risk’ update or one that will make use of a new resource and you’ll like to be able to change fix or adapt to the update in a more gradual way.
More disasters will make iPhones even more vital to people’s lives, Apple predicted.
“As people begin to experience severe weather events with greater frequency, we expect an increasing need for confidence and preparedness in the arena of personal safety and the well-being of loved ones,’’ the company wrote. Its mobile devices “can serve as a flashlight or a siren; they can provide first aid instructions; they can act as a radio; and they can be charged for many days via car batteries or even hand cranks.’’
“It’s different now, because we have smartphones,” Dameff says. “There are mechanisms where consumers have these powerful personal devices. We’re connected. It’s trivial to have an application on your phone to facilitate this.”
Dameff and his colleagues surveyed patients using Apple Health Records in the UC San Diego health system. 132 responded, and nearly all said that connecting to the platform was simple. Just under 80 percent said that they were satisfied with the feature, and 90 percent said that using the system “improved their understanding of their own health, facilitated conversations with their clinicians, or improved sharing of personal health information with friends and family.”
Like many eventual household names in tech, LiveJournal started as a one-man project on a lark, driven by a techy teenager with too much time on their hands. As founder Brad Fitzpatrick recalls, in 1998, after getting kicked off America Online for messing with their service too much, he managed to convince a local ISP to enable his personal website to use the Common Gateway Interface protocol. The move allowed him to write custom scripts that would produce dynamic objects on his page, such as his exact age in seconds, counting ever upward with each refresh. The novelty of these dynamic objects astounded Fitzpatrick, to the point that he eventually made a one-line textbox that floated above his desktop’s Start bar so he could type in and post to his site.
“It didn’t even have a post button,” Fitzpatrick recalls. “It was just the Enter button. My early LiveJournal posts were stuff like ‘going downstairs to get a Coke,’ or ‘I’m bored.’ It was very much like early Twitter.”
If you think you have a winning shot, do participate in Apple's Shot on iPhone contest by emailing your photo to the supplied Apple email address. Because, how would you know that the judges get to even see your photos if you only post them on social media, what with all that hidden algorithms and machine learning that determines who will see your photos when.
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Thanks for reading.