MyAppleMenu

The Winter-Wonderland Edition Friday, November 18, 2022

Apple Brings Snow To Buenos Aires In Juan Cabral's Joyful Holiday Ad, by Tim Nudd, Muse by Clio

Directed by MJZ's Juan Cabral and choreographed by Damien Jalet (doing his first commercial work), the film opens on two friends languorously lounging in a cafe. But soon, a winter wonderland arrives, as if by magic, with a little help from the Audio Sharing feature on the Apple AirPods Pro.

[...]

The soundtrack is "PUFF" by Argentine producer Bizarrap and Belgian Argentine hip-hop artist Bhavi. This is Apple's first global holiday campaign with an entirely Spanish-language anthem. The onscreen talent features dancers Vinson Fraley and Gal Zusmanovich.

Apple May Finally Bring Monthly Security Updates To iPhones, by David Price, Macworld

Apple today began the rollout of its new Rapid Security Responses feature to iOS 16.2 and iPadOS 16.2 beta testers. The mechanism, which is designed to speed up the delivery of security fixes on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, was announced at WWDC and began testing back in October and appears to be ready to go–although we don’t yet know when it will first be made available to macOS testers.

David Ma’s iPhone 14 Pro Film, PINCH, by Josh Rubin, Cool Hunting

Food artist, culinary filmmaker and director David Ma has created a cinematic, stirring short film using the Apple iPhone 14 Pro. In just over one minute, PINCH tells the tale of two crustaceans—a King Crab and a Horseshoe Crab—fighting for dominance. The animals’ sizes and movements, the close-up shots of their pincers and the smoky surface of the water all combine to create a dramatic film that pays homage to Kaiju films.

Stuff

Apple’s Annual Holiday Ad Is Here: ‘Share The Joy’ With AirPods Pro , by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

Apple is out with its annual holiday ad, and the focus is entirely on AirPods Pro this year. The video, titled “Share the Joy,” focuses on the popular Audio Sharing feature of AirPods Pro. “Share the joy of the holidays with Audio Sharing on AirPods Pro,” Apple says.

App Lets iPhones Shoot Time-lapse, Without Having To Stay In One Place, by Ben Coxworth, New Atlas

Created by a team of researchers at Cornell University, the iOS app allows the user (and their iPhone) to come and go from a specific location, shooting aligned images of the same subject every time they're there.

Audible Now Works Independently On Apple Watch With Streaming And One-tap Downloads, by Michael Potuck, 9to5Mac

Shifting away from the reliance on a connection with your iPhone, the popular audiobook app now works independently on Apple Watch for both streaming and downloading content.

Google Maps For iOS Gaining Augmented Reality Live View Search In Select Cities, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

Using Live View, you can open up Maps and tap the camera icon in the search bar to see what’s around you, from shops and banks to ATMs and bars. Google Maps will provide AR-powered directions and arrows, giving you an idea of how far a location is from you and how you can get there.

iPod Touch Lives On With GRID Studio's Wall Art, by Joe Rossignol, MacRumors

GRID Studio is known for creating custom wall art showcasing the history of iconic devices, ranging from the original iPhone to the original Game Boy. Each device is disassembled and the components are artistically displayed and labeled in a frame.

Develop

Command K Bars, by Maggie Appleton

Well-designed GUIs make interfaces easier for new users to learn, improve discoverability, and are better suited to multi-tasking workflows. But they don't scale very well to complex systems with hundreds of commands – especially if those commands can be combined to create emergent complexity.

Notes

1Password Passkeys Demo Shows The Passwordless Future You Can Expect Next Year, by Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac

1Password passkeys functionality will launch next year, but to help people understand the benefits and prepare for a world without passwords, the company has put together an interactive demo.

The Arc Browser Is The Chrome Killer I’ve Been Waiting For, by David Pierce, The Verge

Switching to the Arc browser is hard. You should know that right up front. It’s not that it’s technically difficult: Arc has some simple tools for importing bookmarks, it runs the same underlying engine as Chrome, and the onboarding process is actually thoroughly delightful. It’s just that Arc, the new browser from a startup called The Browser Company, is such a divergent idea about how browsers should work that it takes some time, and some real effort, to get used to.

[...]

Arc wants to be the web’s operating system. So it built a bunch of tools that make it easier to control apps and content, turned tabs and bookmarks into something more like an app launcher, and built a few platform-wide apps of its own. The app is much more opinionated and much more complicated than your average browser with its row of same-y tabs at the top of the screen.

Bottom of the Page

If I did watch Apple's holiday ad correctly, the dog survived, but the chicken didn't. :-)

~

If you are relying on Twitter for anything, like maybe you are logging in using Twitter authentication, or if your web CMS template mandates Twitter links under the bylines, or if your podcast's theme song references your Twitter handles, maybe it's time to get Plan B ready to go?

~

Thanks for reading.