Want to shoot some beautiful slow-motion footage of hummingbirds in flight? As this 4-minute video by photographer and conservationist Phil Torres shows, all you need these days is a smartphone.
Torres was recently in the Ecuadorian cloud forest shooting with his iPhone X and Moment’s lens attachments.
“I soon realized that the wide angle lens gives the iPhone and incredibly close focus point, allowing me to capture hard-to-pull-off wide-angle macro photos and videos,” Torres tells PetaPixel. “I set my iPhone to 240fps on 1080p (which my Canon 1DX Mark II can’t even handle), put on the wide angle lens, set it next to a hummingbird feeder in the cloud forests of Sumaco, and pressed record.”
Myst should need no introduction. It’s a puzzle-heavy, non-violent graphic adventure with a slick visual style and the simplest interface known to humankind. You, the player, are a genderless, unnamed interloper on a surreal island, a world that seems almost to have emerged from a madman’s mind. Things get weirder from here: alternate dimensions; magical books with people trapped inside; and an increasingly sinister plot. This project proceeded to sell more than 6 million copies — the highest sales of any computer game until The Sims.
The ripples of Myst are visible even today, most obviously but far from exclusively within so-called “walking sims” like Firewatch: a focus on atmosphere, on a sense of being there, coupled with a seamless interface. Influence-finding, though, is not my main interest here. What follows is a history of this game’s histories. I want to analyze the dueling narratives that arose to contextualize and explain the single, seismic event that was Myst.
It’s hard to explain today what kind of an amazing revelation the original Myst was. I never finished the game but I loved playing it.
A classic song that receives a very dense music theory dissection in this video. I don’t understand 75% of what he’s saying but it’s still interesting.
Fan of the Yes song Roundabout? This is a wonderful video. Rick Beato does what he does best, taking apart a song, piece by piece, exposing all the complexities and helping you appreciate Roundabout at a whole new level.
Dave Lee started this whole thing, and this is him taking Apple’s new patch for a spin to see if things really are fixed. Good results, thoughtful take on thinness and compromises.
One side note: The day before this patch hit, I tweeted about a Reddit take on thermal throttling. The Reddit take implied that the issue was an issue with the Voltage Regulator Module and not the CPU. This was the first take I saw that implied that this issue was fixable in software and not an Intel i9 issue, not a hardware heat sink issue (at least not completely).
The Reddit take has also been updated to reflect Apple’s patch. All very interesting. Glad this is resolved.
The font picker is one of the most commonly used drop down menus in any creative application. Despite this, the default font picker on macOS has remained largely unchanged since the early days.
What I like about this relatively simple redesign is that it follows the pattern that Apple established in the Mac emoji picker, with sections for frequently used and favorited emoji/fonts.
I’d like to see this pattern become a standard throughout Apple’s design language. For starters, it’d be nice if the iOS emoji picker allowed you to favorite emoji, as you can in macOS.
This is Woz, back in the day. The Macintosh has just been announced, and Woz is counting his losses from the US Festivals. No real mention of Steve Jobs. Fascinating.
I’ve been a dedicated Mac guy for… I don’t know… Near 30 years? But lately I’ve pooh poohed some of the latest Mac features…
Haptic feedback, touch ID, Touch Bar…
It’ll take me a few years, but inevitably, I’ll get a new model Apple product, and the new tech is bundled in… And… Those features turn out to be waaaaaayyy cooler than I thought.
Interesting read, especially regarding Touch Bar. One of the things I love about Apple’s design sense is the thought that goes into each element. It’s delightful when a new feature shaves a bit of time off something I do on a regular basis.
For me, a perfect example of this is my Apple Watch unlocking my Mac. This sort of thing is Apple at their best.
Juli Clover lays out the change from iOS 11 to iOS 12 that simplifies the process of closing out an app. On an iPhone X.
Good to know.
To me, just another sign of how splintered things have become. There’s iOS vs macOS, iPhone vs iPad, iPhone X gestures vs home button gestures, etc. Add to that the large set of features hidden behind 3D-touch. A lot to remember.
Trailer Park was a buzzing hive of weird, funny, angry, often stoned people—most deeply talented—who banded together for about 20 hours a day to somehow perfectly encapsulate two-hour films into two minutes and 30 seconds (and then 60 seconds, 30, 15, whatever your wandering mind has time for). There were teams of editors and assistant editors, pacing producers and nebbish writers, graphics folks and sound engineers. And lowly runners. Sometimes Tom Cruise would ride up in a blacked-out Ford Excursion to pick at cheese plates and stand over an editor’s shoulder as she cut new versions of a Mission: Impossible III trailer. This is the grind.
I love movie trailers. I scour YouTube and my RSS feed for the latest ones and will spend hours watching them on the AppleTV Trailer app. A well-done trailer is like a little movie in and of itself. A good one doesn’t give away too much of a movie but gives you enough to make you want to see it. If you are a movie trailer fan, go to IMDB and check out some of your favourite movies from the 1930s-1970s. The style of trailers has changed remarkably over the years.
About three-quarters of King County drivers surveyed around the first anniversary of the state’s new distracted driving law feel they can text while driving and not crash.
The survey also revealed that while drivers in King County acknowledge that using a phone while driving is dangerous and understand it’s illegal, many are still reluctant to put their phone away.
More than 70 percent of the 900 King County drivers surveyed viewed texting or emailing by others while driving as a very serious personal threat, but 75 percent of drivers believe it’s very unlikely that they will crash their vehicle by texting while driving.
This was a study done in the Seattle area but there’s no reason to believe the results would be much different anywhere else. People in cars are remarkably stupid when it comes to judging their ability to multitask in general and even worse when it comes to using their cell phone in the car.
I’ve said it before, but I love Charvel guitars. Some of my favorite players have used Charvel over the years and even though I have 26 guitars, I’ve never owned a Charvel. This is one I find really interesting. Look at the video on the bottom of the page and listen to how versatile this instrument can be.
Last week a video appeared on the Web from David Lee showing how the new MacBook Pro would throttle down speeds when it got hot under processor loads. Apple told me that the issue Lee was experiencing has been identified and is being fixed today.
As you can imagine, when Apple heard about the problem, they contacted Lee and worked with him to isolate what could be causing the thermal throttling. After extensive testing, they did find the issue, and luckily it wasn’t a hardware issue, but rather a software bug in the firmware.
“Following extensive performance testing under numerous workloads, we’ve identified that there is a missing digital key in the firmware that impacts the thermal management system and could drive clock speeds down under heavy thermal loads on the new MacBook Pro,” An Apple representative told me. “A bug fix is included in today’s macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 Supplemental Update and is recommended. We apologize to any customer who has experienced less than optimal performance on their new systems. Customers can expect the new 15-inch MacBook Pro to be up to 70% faster, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar to be up to 2X faster, as shown in the performance results on our website.”
The bug affects the Core i9, Core i7, and the 13-inch models, so you should install the supplemental update when it comes out this morning.
As Apple said in its statement, all of the performance benchmarks on its website are accurate. The company said that you needed the right combination of workloads for the bug to manifest itself and in all of their testing, they never encountered the problem.
In fact, many people using the MacBook Pro probably wouldn’t have seen the bug manifest itself at all because they didn’t have that perfect storm of extended heavy workloads to make it happen.
As it turns out, the fix for this is straightforward and can be applied to all users very quickly.
Yep. That’s a teeny, tiny spider, wedged between the screen and the glass. 1600 pixels from the right edge of the screen, 840 pixels down. The size of one of the red/yellow/green stoplight buttons on the left side of my window’s title bars. A 20-by-20 pixel area covered by the body of a spider.
And:
You may be saying to yourself, how bad is it, really? Can’t you live with a spider in your display at all times? The answer, after one week, is… no, I don’t think I can. Not if I can avoid it.
Jump to Jason’s post for a picture. And no, I couldn’t live with this either. No chance.
You may not even have noticed that your Mac is now running APFS. To find out, open Disk Utility, click your startup disk in the sidebar, and look under the disk name.
As Jeff suggests, take a minute to launch Disk Utility, click on your startup disk and look at the text underneath the volume name. Mine says “APFS Volume • APFS (Encrypted)”.
This is a terrific read, chock full of detail on APFS, but very readable. And the fact that the transition to APFS has been so seamless for so many says a lot about the APFS engineering team.
I was doing research for a post yesterday and I stumbled on this Stanford University page dedicated to the marketing campaign for the original Macintosh.
Lots of links here, a dive into a wonderful rabbit hole of Apple history.
Gorgeous. Follow the link, check out the images, especially that first one.
This newest Apple destination is in central Milan, just a few blocks from La Scala, the world famous opera house. Two bucket list reasons to visit Milan.
Google has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical Security Keys in place of passwords and one-time codes, the company told KrebsOnSecurity.
Security Keys are inexpensive USB-based devices that offer an alternative approach to two-factor authentication (2FA), which requires the user to log in to a Web site using something they know (the password) and something they have (e.g., a mobile device).
Security keys have been around for a long time – I used one at an engineering firm I worked at 25 years ago – but I wonder if this kind of implementation will not only become more widely used but maybe trickle down to average consumers? Also, there are security concerns regarding plugging in USB devices at work and how secure those devices are in and of themselves. Still, a step towards a different future of passwords.
Outspoken entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk apparently did not like the way Apple marketed its reality show about apps, “Planet of the Apps.”
“I was on an Apple show, ‘Planet of the Apps,’ Gwyneth [Paltrow], Will[.i.am], Jessica Alba, and me. And Apple didn’t use me or Vayner to do the marketing, and did everything wrong. Apple!” he exclaimed, talking about his eponymous marketing company.
According to Vaynerchuk, one issue was that Apple messed up the marketing for the show — but he kept his mouth shut, despite the fact that marketing is his specialty.
This is just revisionist history. The problems with that show started long before Apple Marketing got involved. I’d argue it started with the hosts, Vaynerchuk included, and just snowballed from there. Face it, Gary – it was a bad TV show.
Reddit user Nucleam pulled together an extensive archive of iOS and Mac wallpapers released over the years, gathered, a bit ironically, in Google Photos.
When you think of companies that violate your privacy online, chances are Facebook is one of the first names that come to mind. But there’s another common app that should: Venmo, the PayPal-owned peer-to-peer payment app that lets people send money to friends, family, and anyone else you need to pay (including, for instance, drug dealers). The payments you make on the app, complete with a cute little emoji or note, are public by default, which means that many users don’t realize just how easy it is for the rest of the world to observe the $35 billion in transactions made on Venmo.
When I first read this, I was shocked. This is such a basic breach of user etiquette, so egregious, I struggled to believe it was true.
But I popped open my Venmo app, jumped over to Settings > Privacy and, sure enough, my Default Privacy Setting was set to Public (Visible to everyone on the Internet).
Why, Venmo? Why would you ever think that the transfer of money would be something I’d want to share with the world? What possible use case is that?
And even if there is a case for public visibility, why make it the default?
If you are not yet running iOS 12, or if you’ve never dug into the new Notification Manager, this is worth your time. Jump to the article if you prefer reading through the changes or watch the video embedded below.
From the CIRP mobile market share report, updated to reflect the quarter ending June 30th:
“Apple improved in part at Samsung’s expense, whose share of activiations declined relative to both last quarter and last year,” said Mike Levin, Partner and Co-Founder of CIRP. “In a quarter without any significant phone launches, Samsung had market share only equal to Apple’s. A year ago, Samsung had a considerably greater share of sales.”
Two interesting points from this report:
Android has about 63% of all mobile phone activations and Apple about 36%.
Apple made some nice gains this last quarter as Samsung’s share shrunk. Apple moved from 31% to 36% of all activations and Samsung dropped from 38% down to 36%.
Interesting charts. It’s clearly an iOS/Android world. Windows Phone never had a chance.
It’s a team-up that nearly didn’t happen. The movie gives disgraced ex-cop Jack has five days to bring the Duke from New York to LA to collect a big reward that will allow him to open up a coffee shop, while the Mob accountant tries to avoid being murdered in prison by drug dealer Jimmy Serrano (Dennis Farina, in the best performance of his career), from whom he stole $15 million to give to charity. De Niro, who had been looking to do a comedy after a 15-year run as Hollywood’s most intense method actor, only took the role as a consolation prize when he lost out to Tom Hanks for the lead in Big.
Paramount was originally set to make it as director Martin Brest’s big follow-up to Beverly Hills Cop. But the studio wanted to tweak George Gallo’s script to make the Duke a woman (the Duchess?) played by Cher, hoping to generate some sexual tension. Brest said no to that, and to having Robin Williams play the part, because he’d been so dazzled by Grodin’s audition opposite De Niro. At that point, Paramount abandoned the project altogether and it wound up at Universal, whose executives approved the unconventional casting.
My Australian wife had never seen this movie (as the story notes, it bombed at the box office) so we watched it a few weeks ago and she nearly wet herself laughing. De Niro is utterly brilliant in this comedic role (as is the sadly late Dennis Farina) and Grodin is wonderfully neurotic and annoying.
There’s still one major place that Apple could stand to relax its rules: letting users choose default apps for tasks like mail, calendaring, and web browsing. For users, the benefits of choosing default apps is obvious.
Not everybody is going to switch to a third-party app if this happens. Most people probably are probably happy enough with the defaults. But for those folks who want a feature that Apple’s apps don’t currently have—like snoozing mail message alerts or sync between Chrome on iOS and your PC—the choice to use that app as the default should be available.
As a photographer, I’d love to be able to change the default photo app and I’d love to change the default mapping behaviour to a different app as well. The vast majority of users are unlikely to ever do this but for “power users” of one sort or another, it would be a nice feature.
Earlier this month, the co-working juggernaut announced that it was essentially going vegetarian. The company will no longer serve red meat, pork or poultry at company functions, and it will not reimburse employees who want to order a hamburger during a lunch meeting.
Uncomfortable as the new dietary policy may be, Mr. McKelvey said WeWork is only just getting started. The company is phasing out leather furniture, single-use plastics and is going carbon neutral. In time, he said, the company will evaluate its consumption of seafood, eggs, dairy and alcohol.
“We could have introduced a series of nudges, but then we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Mr. McKelvey said. “And awkward conversations are how we learn.”
Oh, I think we’d learn a lot from the “awkward conversation” I’d have with my boss if he told me I couldn’t eat meat at work.
“You’ll be the person eating carne asada while everyone else is eating the lettuce bowl.”
On July 20, 1969, 49 years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon, took a walk, and returned safely to Earth a few days later. And the whole thing was broadcast live on television screens around the world.
For the 40th anniversary of the landing in 2009, I put together a page where you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk, synced to the present-day time. Just open this page in your browser and the coverage will start playing at the proper time.
If you want to experience it the way “those old folks did”, start watching at 4:10pm ET this afternoon.
Specifically, the concessionaire is testing the use of Apple Business Chat to allow iPhone-equipped fans in certain sections of the ballpark to order water and beer from their seats.
And
To order, a fan would first open the iPhone camera app and scan the QR code on the seat back. That will launch prompts on the iMessage text screen to place the order, which is then completed with Apple Pay. The drink will be delivered supposedly shortly after.
Okay, I like this a lot. I’ve been to San Jose Sharks games where they take your order at the seat and deliver the food, but it’s a hit a miss type of thing. This seems a lot more likely to be successful, and let’s face it, it’s really cool.
