First came the slow embrace, as Apple Watches started appearing on players’ and managers’ wrists in a variety of sports. As the Apple Watch gained in popularity, the pushback started, as people figured out the potential for cheating.
See also, Boston Red Sox Used Apple Watches to Steal Signs Against Yankees.
Scandalous!
[VIDEO] Jeff Benjamin, 9to5Mac, on what you can do with AirPlay 2:
- Quickly see what’s playing in every room on every speaker
- Play the same song, in sync, in every room
- Play different songs on different speakers
- Use Siri to play different songs in different rooms
- Stream to rooms without grouping speakers
Take the time to watch Jeff’s excellent video, embedded in the main Loop post. It starts with the basics of setting up a stereo pair, but then comes the good stuff, as he dives into the details of AirPlay 2. Absolutely worth the watch.
First things first, take a minute to read Apple’s official press release with all the details on iOS 11.4.
With that in mind, this from this Juli Clover MacRumors post:
Apple says the update also successfully fixes an issue that caused iMessages to appear out of order on some devices, a frustrating bug that’s been around for quite some time and has been the subject of many complaints.
This is the big one, to me. So much Messages oddness, hoping this does indeed fix Messages.
Related note: Take a look at Joseph Keller’s iMore post, How to turn on Messages in iCloud.
All this is working fine for me. So far, so good!
[VIDEO] This video (embedded in the main Loop post) was all over the news over the weekend. An incredible, selfless, quick thinking act by Mali migrant Mamoudou Gassama, in Paris illegally, climbing a building to rescue a child dangling from a balcony.
The overwhelming social media response brought this to the attention of French President Emmanuel Macron, who praised Gassama as a hero and offered him full French citizenship and a job as a firefighter.
Amazing.
This is pretty cool. Click on this URL to see your Twitter timeline as it would have looked 10 years ago today if you followed the same people you follow now. Obviously, the actual look is current Twitter, and the stream will only include people who were on Twitter back then.
The date is embedded in the URL, so feel free to muck around to look at different dates. Embed a date one day later than the one you are looking for. For example, here’s one that shows Tweets from January 9th, 2007, the day Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone.
Fun!
[Via Andy Baio]
[VIDEO] Rajesh Pandey, iPhoneHacks:
Getting the 5.8-inch OLED display of the iPhone X repaired from Apple is an expensive process. With Apple charging hundreds of dollars for a screen replacement if you don’t have Apple Care for your iPhone X, it is not surprising that many people end up getting their screen replaced from a third-party repair store which charges significantly less than Apple.
Is there a downside to using an aftermarket replacement? In the video (embedded in the main Loop post), Rajesh takes a look at several aftermarket solutions, compared to an official OEM replacement display.
I came away from this video wondering how representative this is. Do all aftermarket displays suffer from these same shortcomings? At the very least, I would definitely do my homework before I went for a 3rd party replacement display.
Ashraf Eassa, The Motley Fool:
Back in 2013, Apple introduced the A7 system on a chip (SoC) as part of its then-flagship smartphone, the iPhone 5s.
The A7 was the first 64-bit ARM processor.
Now, Intel’s chips, at the time, ran at much higher frequencies (in excess of 3 gigahertz), but what the strong per-gigahertz performance of the A7 chip signaled to me was that Apple had built a very impressive base from which to build up in future smartphone chips.
And:
While Apple is great at chip design, it doesn’t manufacture its own chips — it outsources production to third parties. Apple’s A-series chips through the A7 were manufactured exclusively by Samsung, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company was the exclusive manufacturer of the A8, A10, and A11 chips. TSMC and Samsung reportedly split the orders for the A9.
Both TSMC and Samsung have delivered new manufacturing technologies at a breakneck pace. The performance, power consumption, and economic viability of a chip are determined heavily by the technologies upon which it’s manufactured.
Apple is relentless. As they constantly innovate in chip design, they can take advantage of whatever manufacturing advances bring the most performance advantages for each particular chip generation.
The result:
I believe that when Apple introduces its next iPhone in about four months, it will deliver equal or better CPU performance to Intel’s best notebook processors designed to consume 15 watts but at a fraction of the power consumption.
Amazing.
Daniel Eran Dilger, Apple Insider, takes a look back at past World Wide Developer Conferences and the various technologies Apple revealed. This is not nostalgia, but more an exploration of Apple’s evolving strategies, both in timing and in impact.
One bit in particular:
Recall that several years ago, Android phones essentially had a monopoly on 4G LTE service, a truly compelling and vast jump in data speed over what iPhone 5 could do at the time. That advantage lasted for years, but today is irrelevant.
Qualcomm is now trying to resurrect this in advertising the potential for 1.2Gbit mobile data on its Android chipsets–something that isn’t even available in practice from typical mobile networks. But that marketing hasn’t stopped Apple’s iPhones from being the most popular devices around the world–even with a substantial price premium.
If novel features like voice search and AI were really compelling features that drove significant numbers of buyers to new hardware, Google’s Pixel 2 and Andy Rubin’s Essential phone would not have been total duds. The reality is that mainstream buyers consider factors like longevity, reliability and brand experience, and that gives Apple a reprieve from chasing down every short-term tech fad and brief feature advantage its competitors can offer.
I thought this was a terrific read, start to finish. The WWDC keynote is this coming Monday, June 4th.
This is a complete waste of time. But I loved every minute of it.
The idea of this game is a game minimalist’s dream. Click and roll your mouse to generate points. Get enough points, wheel over and grab a multiplier or other bonus thingy. All to increase the points you gather with your mad mouse skills.
Eventually, you will win. Works on iOS Safari, but not nearly as free wheeling.
Khoi Vinh, on last year’s App Store redesign:
I myself paid it scant attention until one day this past winter when I realized that the company was commissioning original illustration to accompany its new format. If you check the App Store front page a few times a week, you’ll see a quietly remarkable display of unique art alongside unique stories about apps, games and “content” (movies, TV shows, comics, etc.). To be clear: this isn’t work lifted from the marketing materials created by app publishers. It’s drawings, paintings, photographs, collages and/or animations that have been created expressly for the App Store.
This whole writeup is terrific, but what really struck me was this Pinterest catalog pulled together from screen grabs Khoi took of various App Store pages. Fantastic work on all counts.
And bravo to the App Store team for pulling this off.
Boing Boing:
In 2003 Bill Gates tried to download Microsoft Movie Maker from Microsoft.com. His confusing, frustrating, futile experience prompted him to write a terrifically scorching email to the managers in charge of the project. It starts off pretty mild, with just a hint of the brutally funny sarcasm to come. (“I typed in movie maker. Nothing. So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist? So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.”) It gets better from there.
Here’s a link to a PDF of the actual email exchange. Start at the bottom with Bill’s email, then work your way up.
I feel your pain, Bill.
Looking for a Mac game? This is a nice resource, with enough of a writeup on each game to give you a sense if it’s your cup of tea.
I can’t praise this essay from Federico Viticci enough. After a long, harrowing bout with cancer, Federico writes about his second life, and a renewed focus on exercise, mindfulness, and gratitude.
There’s not one bit of preachy here. This is personal reflection. Take a few minutes to read it. This really resonates with me. There’s value here.
[VIDEO] If the headline rings any bells at all, spend a few minutes watching this well edited and entertaining video (embedded in main Loop post) of Will Smith talking through all his trials and tribulations to get to the job that would change his life.
The Computer History Museum originally posted this back in 2013, but for some reason, this made it all the way to the top spot on Hacker News this morning.
I saw it, found it fascinating (especially since my very first Mac programming experience was with Pascal), and thought you might enjoy this look back at the early days of Photoshop.
Stephen Silver, Apple Insider:
After years of controversies over Consumer Reports’ assessments of Apple products, AppleInsider paid a visit to the organization’s headquarters for an inside look at the testing process.
The whole thing was fascinating, but start things off with a read of this actual Consumer Reports press release, specifically targeted at Apple Insider.
Glad those fences are mended.
Are you still dependent on an older, 32-bit app? If so, the linked how-to from iMore should help. Pretty interesting.
A few weeks ago, we linked to an article that talked you through the process of requesting a copy of the data Apple associates with your AppleID. In a nutshell, that process had you jump through hoops to identify your location, then fill out a form requesting your data.
Apple just made the process both easier and more logical for EU users, and according to this post from Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac, the new process “will roll out worldwide in the coming months”.
No matter your location, follow this link, to privacy.apple.com, and log in with your Apple ID. All users should see options to correct your data and permanently delete your account.
If you don’t see the ability to download your data, check back in periodically. If you are outside the EU and see the download link, please do ping me so I can update this post. And take a look at Benjamin’s article, linked above, to get a sense of what data is being made available.
This is part of the process of complying with GDPR, but I like how front and center Apple has placed the ability to delete your account.
Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. manufacturing partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has started mass production of next-generation processors for new iPhones launching later this year, according to people familiar with the matter.
The processor, likely to be called the A12 chip, will use a 7-nanometer design that can be smaller, faster and more efficient than the 10-nanometer chips in current Apple devices like the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, the people said.
7 nanometers is the next planned design threshold for semiconductor manufacturing, with 5 nanometer designs about 3 years away.
To give a sense of the curve here:
A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. Next step smaller? An angstrom is one tenth of a nanometer. So the 7nm threshold we are about to breach is also the 70 angstrom threshold. Tiny.
[VIDEO] This is a video (embedded in the main Loop post) of Prince doing a benefit at a Minneapolis club, performing a version of Purple Rain that would go on, after editing, to become the album version of the song.
As you watch the video, check the comments/subtitles to watch for where the album version edits occur. Fascinating to watch this source material of such an important (to me at least) work.
Check this link and this link for some more detail on that 1983 benefit.
Thoughtful post from Jason Snell for Tom’s Guide, with some interesting suggestions for iOS 12.
One section focuses on Notification Center:
Notification Center on iOS is kind of a mess. It’s time for an overhaul. App notifications should be grouped together, with more opportunities to act on notifications directly from the notifications list. Clearing all notifications should be an obvious feature, and one that’s available even on devices without 3D Touch.
I’d add this: Consider requiring a longer tap to jump from a notification to the app tied to that notification.
Why? I frequently find myself going to tap on something toward the top of the screen and, just as I’m about to make contact, a notification appears and I end up tapping the notification instead, launching myself out of my app. If a bit of a long press was required to respond to a notification, my simple tap would be ignored by the notification and I could dismiss it and return to my tap-happiness.
First things first, not sure “so buggy” is the right note here. Might be that, or might be more a combination of “so important” and taking advantage of a feature or bit of code that has been put out to pasture or has been replaced.
That said, this post from Worth Doing Badly is an interesting read, developer or not. The list of apps is long and familiar and, if you are a dev, there’s some depths to plumb.
Fast Company:
Getty has seen searched for disability-related images spike in the past year–“wheelchair access” searches were up 371% from 2016 to 2017, and autism-related searches climbed 434%–and the issue of representation became impossible to ignore.
That also became clear to Oath, the parent company of Yahoo and Tumblr, as they were working to set up a website highlighting their work around accessibility in tech and having difficulty finding representative images. So the company, with consult from the National Disability Leadership Alliance, tapped Getty to help change the current representation paradigm from the inside out. Launched May 17, The Disability Collection, a new subcategory of Getty images, will feature people with disabilities in everyday settings.
And:
If more images of people with disabilities in the workplace, attending sporting events, and taking on leadership positions begin to flood the media, perhaps it will help barriers to participation in these fields come down.
Exceptionally well said. One nit, though. As stated by Steven Aquino in this tweet:
The use of “able-bodied” to describe non-disabled people in this story isn’t great.
How about changing that, Fast Company? And if you need some help with wording, I’m sure Steven would be more than happy to help sort that out.
[VIDEO] Michael Steeber, 9to5Mac:
After releasing two Animoji-themed music spots just in time for the Grammy Awards earlier this year followed by another for the UK BRIT music awards in February, Apple has extended the series by featuring South Korean group HYUKOH‘s new single “Citizen Kane,” which was released yesterday on Apple Music ahead of an EP release on May 31st.
Nice find. I love this ad (embedded in the main Loop post). Love the music, love the dazzling neon-infused graphics. Enjoy.
Big wave of posts over the last day or so, all of them quoting this post, which says, in part:
With Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) inching closer, Siri has revealed plans for Apple to give the assistant a “brand new voice”, most likely as part of its iOS 12 release.
As discovered by Nathan Simpson when users ask “Hey Siri. Tell me about WWDC”, Siri responds with “La la la, Siri is getting a brand new voice!”.
And in this associated post, they say:
As discovered by The Apple Post on Monday, when users ask “Hey Siri. Tell me about WWDC” the assistant responds with a couple of different answers, however, the most interesting is when the reply implies of a new “meshey & matte” home for Siri.
First things first, these Siri responses are from the leadup to WWDC 2017, when the HomePod was first announced. Seems like Apple neglected to tweak Siri for this year’s WWDC, leaving those old responses in place, waiting to be rediscovered.
I gave Siri the exact same query, “Tell me about WWDC” and invariably got some form of “You can get all the details on Apple’s web site” with a button to take me there. So this seems fixed now.
Over the weekend, this tweet appeared:
https://twitter.com/adriankovacs14/status/997881481325416448
First things first, Joanna Stern is one of the founders of The Verge and now writes a widely read tech column for the Wall Street Journal.
Here’s Joanna’s delighted response:
That’s it, I finally love Siri. Apple finally did it.
Here’s a link to Joanna’s Wikipedia page. This turns out to be important since this is the page Siri quotes in the response to the question, “How old is Joanna Stern?”, as shown in the embedded tweet.
I went to the Wikipedia page and did not find any reference to a birthdate. Birthdates are common for most biographical Wikipedia pages. So how did Siri come up with an age as a response to this request?
And to make matters even more confusing, when I posed the same question to Siri, I get the same link, but this response:
Joanna Stern is 32
Siri also helpfully provides a date of birth of December 5, 1985.
According to Joanna’s response on Twitter, both of these are wrong.
This anecdote made me think about the source of Siri’s information and how vulnerable Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google-person are to misinformation. I’m also interested in how Siri came up with that birthdate, given the link was to a page with no embedded birthdate field.
Jim Black, former technology evangelist at Apple, tells the story of legendary game developer John Carmack (Doom, Quake, lots more) coming to Apple to meet with Steve Jobs:
I never knew whether it was by design or not, but on that day John wore a T-shirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead from which trickled a few drops of blood. After an hour of waiting for Steve in IL1, he marched into the room, and immediately mistook me for John Carmack, extending his hand to shake mine (we had never met). I locked eyes with Steve Jobs and looked down significantly at the Apple badge on my belt. Without missing a beat, Steve shifted his extended hand to John’s.
That’s when Steve noticed the T-shirt and the meeting, as soon as it had begun, took a turn for the worse.
I love a good Steve anecdote. I wonder if John was wearing a T-shirt with the Watchmen Comedian’s Badge logo.
Chris Seline:
I decided I would target the CEO of Reddit with Facebook ads.
But how? I didn’t have a big budget so I needed to be clever.
It turns out the Reddit CEO had a public Facebook profile, so I could go there to see details about him. Where he lived. What he was interested in. I took that info to the Facebook platform to help narrow down the campaign. But I didn’t want everyone to click on it, just one person. So I custom tailored the ad to directly target the one person I wanted to read it.
I applaud Chris’ initiative here. Incredibly clever to figure out how to get in front of a difficult to reach person via a highly personalized Facebook ad. His strategy worked. Read the post for the details.
As to how much Chris spent:
The ad reached 197 people. 4 People clicked on it. One of them was the CEO of Reddit. I spent a total of $10.62.
Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, saw my ad, clicked on it, read (probably skimmed) my article, and liked it well enough to send a note to Reddit HR to contact me about a position.
Mission accomplished.
Clever as this is, I can’t help but see a stalker/creepy side to this story as well. The thought that someone could use information easily available on the internet to build a low cost ad that is almost guaranteed to reach the targeted individual seems custom made for a stalker. Or for someone trying to win an election.
Jason Koebler, Motherboard:
When Google Photos was announced in 2015, I downloaded it. I had no intention of giving every photo I’ve ever taken to Google—which categorizes them, runs them through image recognition and facial recognition algorithms, makes weird algorithmic slideshows out of them, and adds them to its massive photo database—but I wanted to try it out in any case. I quickly realized it was not for me, but I did not delete the app.
And:
I texted him asking to see a picture. He responded with a video that he uploaded to Google Photos. Because I had Google Photos installed on my phone, it tried to open in the app. You cannot use Google Photos on iOS—even to view photos that have been shared with you—without granting the app access to all the photos on your phone. Because I was drunk, and because I wanted to see the puppy, I changed my app permissions. I watched the video (very cute, embedded below), the band started, I put the phone in my pocket.
You know what happened next. All his photos went up to Google’s servers, and went through the AI analysis that all photos go through.
Two sides to this. First, obviously, Jason made a mistake giving Google Photos permission to access his photos. Google Photos asked, as it should.
That said, this is the text of the alert Google Photos put up:
Google Photos needs access to your photo library to show photos in the app
Reading Jason’s piece, I don’t get any sense that Google Photos notified him that they were going to start uploading his photos to the Google servers, to start AI-analyzing them.
Should Apple require a finer grain notification when something like this happens? Or, at the very least, should Google recognize that this is a major change in the equation, let the user know that permission to show you a photo from another user gives them permission to suck up and analyze all your photos.
This is some crazy magic. Click through to the main Loop post, then follow the instructions. Not a cheap trick, but actual science at work. Crazy magic science.