Most of us have been inside an Apple store. We need a charger or we need to check out the latest thing. Maybe we need our phone fixed or our computer looked at.
Having worked there for five years, most people of the customers I interacted with didn’t take advantage of most of the services Apple offers. This is your quick and dirty guide to finding what your local Apple store has to offer, the questions you should ask, and how to get the quickest help you need. So envision a blue shirt, and here we go.
With AirDrop, Apple has come up with a simpler way to pass files around. In doing so, it’s made traditional file sharing seem old and fussy. So my modest proposal to Apple is to take AirDrop and expand its powers. Let people in homes and offices use it to drop files to each other, even if they’re not fortunate enough to be sitting right next to each other. Apple, you did your job and you did it well—I’ve utterly embraced AirDrop. But now I want more.
But the real problem is that, even if this was a reasonably good machine for 2005, an era when switchers were rampant, web technology has totally left it behind, making using it for its original purpose an exercise in frustration.
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So using this thing like a Chromebook is totally out of the question. On the plus side, creature comforts that come with using a modern-day Mac are well-represented. It’s strange to think about now, but many popular apps that are widely used in the modern day—most famously Dropbox and Evernote, but also popular utilities such as Alfred and 1Password—were a part of the Mac ecosystem from their beginnings. And tools that I use on a daily basis, such as the word-manipulation utility TextSoap, have robust PowerPC versions that work not unlike their modern peers. It’s bizarre to think about, but the Mac ecosystem has influenced a lot about the way we use computers, in part because of all these software tools that can be used to this day on a G4 Mac Mini.
Apple Teacher — a a free professional learning program designed to support and celebrate educators using Apple products for teaching and learning — has been updated with a new professional learning experience.
Pennies is a super elegant and beautiful budget tracking app for iPhone and iPad. The app, made by Emile Bennett, is designed to be a simple way to manage and track your expenses. Pennies helps you create budgets and lets you track your expenses and spends within those budgets. This straightforward approach by Pennies makes it a very effective finance tracking app for your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
The concern I’ve heard voiced most often by developers is whether someone who uses one Apple ID to log into their developer account would be able to do so using an Apple device that is logged in using a different Apple ID. Today, Apple published a new support page answering this and many other questions.
Apple has posted a developer support document that outlines a few ways to enable two-factor authentication on a non-primary Apple ID, but Apple's suggestion for iOS involves signing out of your primary iCloud account. That can be a hassle as your phone unsyncs and tries to delete content associated with that account, so it's better to use other methods if you can.
Turning on two-factor authentication for an alternate Apple ID and getting it to work properly with trusted iOS devices without signing out of your primary Apple ID requires a few steps, but once they're done the feature should work seamlessly.
For several months, Cara has been working up the courage to approach her mom about what she saw on Instagram. Not long ago, the 11-year-old—who, like all the other kids in this story, is referred to by a pseudonym—discovered that her mom had been posting photos of her, without prior approval, for much of her life. “I’ve wanted to bring it up. It’s weird seeing myself up there, and sometimes there’s pics I don’t like of myself,” she said.
Like most other modern kids, Cara grew up immersed in social media. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were all founded before she was born; Instagram has been around since she was a toddler. While many kids may not yet have accounts themselves, their parents, schools, sports teams, and organizations have been curating an online presence for them since birth. The shock of realizing that details about your life—or, in some cases, an entire narrative of it—have been shared online without your consent or knowledge has become a pivotal experience in the lives of many young teens and tweens.
On March 31, 1913, in the Great Hall of the Musikverein concert house in Vienna, a riot broke out in the middle of a performance of an orchestral song by Alban Berg. Chaos descended. Furniture was broken. Police arrested the concert’s organizer for punching Oscar Straus, a little-remembered composer of operettas. Later, at the trial, Straus quipped about the audience’s frustration. The punch, he insisted, was the most harmonious sound of the entire evening. History has rendered a different verdict: the concert’s conductor, Arnold Schoenberg, has gone down as perhaps the most creative and influential composer of the 20th century.
You may not enjoy Schoenberg’s dissonant music, which rejects conventional tonality to arrange the 12 notes of the scale according to rules that don’t let any predominate. But he changed what humans understand music to be. This is what makes him a genuinely creative and innovative artist. Schoenberg’s techniques are now integrated seamlessly into everything from film scores and Broadway musicals to the jazz solos of Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman.
Creativity is among the most mysterious and impressive achievements of human existence. But what is it?