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The Game-Changer Edition Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Apple Vision Pro Unlocks New Opportunities For Health App Developers, by Apple

“We’re thrilled to see the incredible apps that developers across the healthcare community are bringing to Apple Vision Pro,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “The imagination and drive of our developers, combined with the technical capabilities of visionOS, are igniting new possibilities for physicians, frontline workers, and even students, and we can’t wait to see what’s to come.”

Here are just a few of the apps currently available on Apple Vision Pro in the healthcare and wellness space.

Surgeons Use Apple's VR Goggles In An Operation For The First Time In The UK As They Repair A Patient's Spine, by Jim Norton, Daily Mail

A scrub nurse working alongside the surgeon wore the device to help prepare, keep track of the procedure, and choose the right tools.

[...]

Suvi Verho, lead scrub nurse at London Independent Hospital, said the technology was a 'gamechanger', adding: 'It eliminates human error. It eliminates the guesswork.

Apple In EU

Apple Will Allow Users To Download Apps Directly From A Developer’s Website, In Latest EU App Store Rule Change, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

First off, Apple says that app marketplaces can now offer a catalog of apps solely from the developer of that marketplace. [...]

Second, Apple is also giving developers a way to forgo the app marketplace route entirely. Later this spring, Apple will add a new “Web Distribution” feature that lets developers distribute their iOS apps directly from their website. This means that iPhone users will be able to go to a developer’s website and download an app, without using the App Store or any alternative app marketplace whatsoever.

Apple Bows To Brussels Over App Store In Latest EU Concession, by Javier Espinoza, Financial Times

As part of the latest changes announced on Tuesday, developers will also be able to offer their own apps on an alternative marketplace without having to be on the App Store and they will be able to offer promotions directly to their customers in whatever way they want. Both changes are effective immediately for customers in Europe.

[...]

EU officials are studying the first compliance reports of these companies to determine which will be the first to be subjected to infringement proceedings to force full compliance, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Once More Unto The Apple / Epic / European-Commission Breach, Dear Friends, Once More, by John Gruber, Daring Fireball

To Apple executives, it might have made sense to cite in their correspondence with Epic their ongoing denigration of Apple’s developer terms, as evidence that Epic remains recalcitrant and untrustworthy. To almost everyone outside Apple Park, however — most especially (a) third-party developers who have been, for years, souring on Apple’s App Store policies; and (b) EC commissioners, who are ebulliently roasting Apple as a regulatory target and feasting on the resulting publicity — it looks not like a policy of “We’re not going to reinstate Developer Program privileges to a proven rule-breaker whose stated goal was then, and remains now, to break our control over our own platform”, but instead a retaliatory policy of “We’ll terminate the account of any developer who speaks out against us.

That Apple couldn’t see how this would play is on them.

Stuff

Apple Maps Cycling Directions Expand To Belgium, by Tim Hardwick, MacRumors

Apple Maps has expanded the availability of cycling routes in Europe by adding support for the country of Belgium.

Adobe Photoshop Elements Review - Updated For 2024, by Cliff Joseph, Macworld

One of the headline features in Photoshop Elements 2024 is Match Color, which is available within the FX panel in both Quick mode and the Advanced mode for experienced users. In Quick mode you can simply choose a number of presets that allow you to quickly change the colours and tonal balance within a photo, while Advanced mode also allows you to import your own photos and copy the colour settings from one photo to another.

Mimestream 1.3, by Agen Schmitz, TidBITS

The release adds a private deep linking feature that allows the creation of links to specific email messages, along with an email address suggestion blocklist that prevents an address from being suggested.

Develop

Apple, Google, And Others Announce Speedometer 3.0 Browser Benchmark, by Tim Hardwick, MacRumors

Apple in collaboration with other browser engine developers has announced the release of Speedometer 3.0, described by Apple as "the best way yet to measure browser benchmark performance."

[...]

Speedometer 3.0 takes into account the most common versions of popular frameworks including React, Vue, Angular, Preact, Lit, Backbone, and Svelte. It also features an updated set of simulated workloads to measure more of the work the browser does in response to user actions, such as painting and asynchronous tasks.

Notes

Apple To Expand Applied Research Operations In Shanghai And Shenzhen, by Xinmei Shen, South China Morning Post

Cupertino, California-based Apple plans to expand its research centre in Shanghai to support all of its product lines and open a new lab in southern tech hub Shenzhen later this year, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. The Shenzhen lab is expected to boost Apple’s testing and research capabilities for its major products including the iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro mixed-reality headset, according to the company. The new facility will also serve to strengthen the firm’s collaboration with local suppliers, while providing support to all its employees in the region.

Apple Is Showing Its Growing TV Ad Ambitions As It Poaches Key Execs From NBCUniversal And Others, by Lucia Moses, Business Insider

These hires are the latest signs pointing to Apple's plans for an advertising tier. It had its biggest presence yet at last year's Cannes ad festival, the ad industry's biggest confab of the year, contrasting with its usual low-key presence at industry events.

Apple Has Begun Testing An AI-powered Ad Product Similar To Google's Performance Max As It Looks To Supercharge Its $7 Billion Ad Business, by Lara O'Reilly, Business Insider

In this new campaign type, advertisers enter their budget and cost per acquisition target, as well as the desired audiences and countries they want to reach. Apple's algorithm then automatically decides where best to place the brand's ads across the four available formats.

Bottom of the Page

I sure hope the EU is advising Apple -- and other gatekeepers -- on what is acceptable and what is not acceptable under DMA privately, and not having to resort to lawsuits to resolve things.

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Thanks for reading.