The new Photographic Styles are extremely powerful and, in my opinion, will greatly enhance how all iPhone users experience and enjoy photography with friends. This is a feature that may be worth the upgrade, especially if you don’t consider yourself an expert photo editor with tools like Lightroom.
What’s obvious is that Camera Control clearly was conceived of, designed, and engineered by photography aficionados within Apple who are intimately familiar with how great dedicated cameras work and feel. It surely must have been championed, politically, by the same group. It’s really just rather astounding that there is now a hardware control dedicated to photography on all new iPhones — and a mechanically complex control at that.
While the original announcement of Sequoia at WWDC 2024 focused heavily on a raft of “AI” features – largely absent so far – less attention was given to the privacy and security changes in macOS 15. In this post, we bring you a quick roundup of the features in Sequoia that enterprise security teams should be aware of before upgrading.
To be fair, Apple does not guarantee that hiding an app means there is no way of discovering that it is installed. The UI warns you about this, even. When you confirm you want to hide an app, the modal dialog even says that it may still be visible in “a few places such as Settings”.
With this week’s release of iOS 18, adding smart home devices to Apple Home just got a lot easier. The update brings direct local control of Matter devices to newer iPhones, meaning all you need to set up and control them is an iPhone that can run iOS 18 — no hub or border router required. This is good news for anyone interested in dabbling in smart home gadgets who isn’t ready to go all in.
Apple has published its guidelines for developers, which give us some idea of what we can expect when supported by our favorite photo and video apps.
There’s nothing truly new here. This is the same as the regular Ultra 2. The only difference is that this is black. That’s it. It bears reminding: the Ultra 2 is $800. I think we, rational human beings, can all agree it would be simply ludicrous to upgrade for just a new color. This would be a no-brainer if the black Ultra 2 was ugly.
Alas, it looks sick as hell.
EU watchdogs announced under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act that Apple must step into line with strict new laws on making operating systems fully functional with other technologies. The Brussels-based authority gave the company six months to comply, or face the threat of future penalties.
While the announcement is a step shy of being a formal investigation, the EU aims to compel Apple to re-engineer its services to allow rival companies to access the iPhone’s and iPad operating systems.
Apple is rolling out another firmware update today for AirPods Pro 2 users today. Today’s update comes just under a week after Apple released new AirPods Pro firmware for iOS 18, with new features like Voice Isolation, Personalized Volume improvements, and more.
Apple is also rolling out a new firmware version for the new AirPods 4, version 7A304.
Objective Development has released Little Snitch 6.1 with added support for macOS 15 Sequoia, improved customization of the menu bar, and enhanced Internet Access Policy support.
In addition to adding support for macOS 15 Sequoia, the update brings the Audio Routing Kit (ARK) audio capture backend (which can be set up quickly on a new Mac with no restarts or passwords required) and an updated Permissions window with a new System Audio Access option that enables you to record audio from applications you specify.
You probably think that if you want to check out a museum, you actually have to go there. But that's not the case anymore, thanks to the popularity of smartphones. Today, with apps like Bloomberg Connects, you can see and learn about collections from all over the world.
Party! Disposable Camera is designed with events, like weddings, specifically in mind. Hosts create a QR code that attendees can scan to join the event. From there, all photos each guest captures are collected into a single gallery for the host. The experience basically digitizes how a big bowl of disposable cameras would have been used at weddings back in the 1990s, except it doesn’t create any waste, the number of captures guests can take isn’t limited, and there is no cost to get the film developed.
Stigma over hearing loss — and old-school hearing aids — persists, even though over 30 million Americans suffer from some level of hearing loss. Can the new AirPods convince more people to get their hearing tested, boost their aural faculties, and lead better lives? Attorney Haben Girma, the first deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School and the author of Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, is optimistic about what the new AirPods — available this fall in many countries — can offer.
You are unlikely to find that your iPhone, Kindle, or Beats headphones have been modified to include pentaerythritol tetranitrate or hexogen, the two compounds currently suspected to have been used in the Lebanon detonations. That’s not because such a thing can’t be done—as little as 3 grams of these materials can be highly explosive, and it would, in principle, be possible to cram that much into even the small cavities of a circuit-packed iPhone. In theory, someone could interfere with such a device, either during manufacture or afterward. But they would have to go to great effort to do so, especially at large scale. Of course, this same risk applies not just to gadgets but to any manufactured good.
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And yet it’s also the case that a new type of terror has been birthed by this attack. In Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East especially, citizens can now reasonably fear that ordinary devices might also be bombs. Depending on how the devices made their way to their new owners, it’s also possible that the bomb-gadgets have leaked into more general circulation.
I will keep trying. I will sync. I will cloud. I will keep the app open because, apparently, I have a lot of photos to back up, and the backup will pause when the app is closed. This is extortion. I love you.
I do have all my photos up on the cloud. The question I have, instead: will anyone care?
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Thanks for reading.