The 2024 Apple Design Award (ADA) winner for Innovation is a point-and-click adventure that follows two young siblings, Toto and Gal, through a beautifully animated world of forbidden forests, dark caverns, friendly frogs, and mischievous gnomes. To advance through the game’s story, players complete fun mini-games and puzzles, all of which feel like a Saturday morning cartoon: Before the journey is out, the pair will fetch a sword from a stone, visit a goblin village, soar over the sea on an enormous bird, and navigate the real-world challenges of sibling rivalry. They will also order several pizzas.
Distraction Control reduces annoying elements like content overlays or sign-in banners on articles and web pages.
Apple is eliminating the option to Control-click to open Mac software that is not correctly signed or notarized in macOS Sequoia. To install apps that Gatekeeper blocks, users will need to open up System Settings and go to the Privacy and Security section to "review security information" before being able to run the software.
With macOS Sequoia this fall, using apps that need access to screen recording permissions will become a little bit more tedious. Apple is rolling out a change that will require you to give explicit permission on a weekly basis to these types of apps, and every time you reboot your Mac.
Apple Arcade has announced its upcoming releases with three new games and a range of updates landing in September. Headlining the new launches is NFL Retro Bowl ’25 featuring official teams and players with nostalgic graphics and gameplay.
With real-time updates on Apple Maps, users in Tokyo can view detailed schedules, real-time departure and arrival times, and transfers to help plan their journeys. Apple adds that important real-time transit information such as service suspensions and delays will also be provided.
With version 2.0, GoodLinks adds highlighting and note-taking combined with excellent Shortcuts support, giving users full access and flexibility to incorporate saved URLs, highlights, and notes into their workflows however they want.
Flighty is using aviation authority data and machine learning to provide early warnings of delays, and when a delay is official, the reason for the delay. Most delays are due to airspace issues and late aircraft, both of which Flighty will monitor.
In a significant update, version 2.0 of the app adds support for controlling multiple iPhones remotely. With the feature enabled, one iPhone acts as a controller, and other iPhones can be connected using the app via a wired or Wi-Fi network. Users can then control app features like zoom, focus, white balance, frame rate, shutter angle, and lens selection, and synchronize the cameras to record simultaneously.
To celebrate 25 years of SpongeBob SquarePants, Paramount Plus and the team at Nickelodeon are debuting a 'Bikini Bottom' environment for the Apple Vision Pro.
It’ll transport you to Conch Street to see the famous pineapple under the sea, Patrick’s rock, and Squidward's humble abode. But the real fun starts when you realize it’s not just a visual treat – it's interactive, too. You can look around and open doors – or rather the lid for Patrick – to hear sound bites, making the experience truly engaging.
According to the judge, it’s not just that Google pays Apple not to challenge its search supremacy — it would be unbelievably difficult for Apple to get in on the action at all. Unsurprisingly, both Google and Apple have looked into this, and their own internal estimates came out at trial.
Apparently, Apple has calculated that “it would cost $6 billion annually (on top of what it already spends developing search capabilities) to run a GSE.” Meanwhile, in “late 2020, Google estimated how much it would cost Apple to create and maintain a GSE that could compete with Google.” Apple would have to spend something “in the rough order of” $20 billion in order “to reproduce [Google’s technical] infrastructure dedicated to search.”
I am not sure I buy that $6 to $20 billion figures thrown out about how much Apple need to spend to replicate Google's search business. You don't need to index the entire world wide web in order to run a fine-enough search engine.
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Thanks for reading.