The question that I, as a tech reviewer, hear most often from friends and colleagues is whether they should buy the new (insert gadget name here). But using the approach I’ve described, you can develop an intuition for when it’s a smart time to upgrade — and when it’s risky.
The point of this article is not to argue that companies like Google and Facebook are in the right, and Apple in the wrong — or, for that matter, to argue my self-interest. The truth, as is so often the case, is somewhere in the middle, in the gray.
Apple today released a surprise iOS 13.1 beta, which is unprecedented as the company has never before released a point update for an unreleased software update.
iOS 13.1 was not a mistake, though, and it appears to be an update that Apple will debut shortly after the release of iOS 13, necessitating developer testing now. iOS 13.1 includes new features and brings back some features that were removed from the iOS 13 update over the beta testing period.
It’s clear that Apple is trying to make iOS 13.0 as stable as possible, even if it means releasing some features a bit later this fall.
Apple’s ways are mysterious, but it does need a version of iOS to ship on its new iPhones that enables brand-new features of that hardware.
Basically, I think we need to get used to WWDC announcements being a roadmap for the next year of OS releases, not a list of what’s going to ship in the initial dot-zero release in the fall.
Siri is starting to give answers from the web, and it’s a huge improvement.
This has long been a strength of Google Assistant, which leans on Google’s extensive web crawling and “snippets” in search results.
Creaceed has been refining the scanning process for years, and with version 5 of Prizmo, it has reduced scanning to just three steps. When you point an iOS device’s camera at a page, Prizmo detects its edges, highlighting the entire sheet in blue. Tap the shutter button to take a photo of the page, and Prizmo opens a preview of the image where you can make adjustments to the page detection and rotate the image. The final step, if you’ve got no other pages to scan, is to tap ‘Done’ and save your scan. Prizmo can also import images of documents from your Photos library and detect the page’s orientation using machine learning to auto-rotate the image.
One chief advantage of Dark Noise over its competition is that out of the gate it’s the best of iOS citizens. Nearly every relevant iOS technology that Apple puts at developers’ disposal has been implemented in Dark Noise: Siri shortcuts, haptic feedback, alternate app icons, a customizable widget, an iPad version with Split View support, and more. I’ve never used an ambient noise app with such strong system integrations.
What makes Dark Noise truly special, however, is the way it’s easy not only on the ears, but the eyes too. Chapman’s pedigree as a designer and motion graphics artist shines throughout the app, creating a design experience through animations and gestures that’s truly delightful.
You can use the app to take selfies, interpret photos from your phone’s photo gallery or just mess around with resolution to see how finely detailed, or how abstractly and yet obviously emoji-based, you can get.