In recent years, data companies have harnessed new technology to immediately identify what people are watching on internet-connected TVs, then using that information to send targeted advertisements to other devices in their homes.
And:
Once enabled, Samba TV can track nearly everything that appears on the TV on a second-by-second basis, essentially reading pixels to identify network shows and ads, as well as programs on Netflix and HBO and even video games played on the TV. Samba TV has even offered advertisers the ability to base their targeting on whether people watch conservative or liberal media outlets and which party’s presidential debate they watched.
You might think this is nothing new, but this isn’t simply translating the current time and the channel on the screen to know what show is playing. This is actually analyzing the pixels on the screen to suss out the nature of the content. They can tell what video game you are playing, or watch you watching home videos, harvesting data and drawing conclusions all the while.
Note that, currently, the beta is limited to developers. But one way to follow along is via Twitter. As usual with anything associated with automation, I turn first to Federico Viticci (@viticci on Twitter). Here’s just a taste:
You can run arbitrary JavaScript in Safari with Shortcuts and I'm going to lose my goddamn mind with this app pic.twitter.com/OMKyD7teGw
When Apple introduced the App Store on July 10, 2008 with 500 apps, it ignited a cultural, social and economic phenomenon that changed how people work, play, meet, travel and so much more. Over the past decade, the App Store has created a safe place for users of all ages to get the very best apps and a vibrant app economy for developers of all sizes, from all over the world, to thrive. Today, customers in 155 countries are visiting the App Store more often, staying longer and downloading and using more apps than ever before.
While there have been many notable moments since apps first came to iPhone and later iPad, the milestones and testimonials below reflect some of the most significant over the past 10 years — defining how the App Store democratized software distribution and transformed how we live every day.
Apple rightly toots its own horn here. While the App Store can (and will) deserve criticism from a lot of people, developers and users alike, it’s still the best, most secure way to to get apps on our iOS devices.
Today we’re rolling out an update for Twitterrific on iOS and macOS that addresses upcoming changes with how apps interact with Twitter. Unfortunately, these changes cripple the ability of third-party apps like Twitterrific to do push notifications and live-stream events.
We had hoped there would be cost-effective ways to work around these limitations, but since that’s looking increasingly unlikely, today we’re here to explain exactly what these changes mean to Twitterrific users like yourself.
The idiots running Twitter continue to make decisions that hurt the platform.
With the beta release of watchOS 5, a new switch appeared in Apple Watch settings (on the watch itself, Settings > General > Siri). Here’s a screenshot:
Interestingly, even with the switch on and the latest beta installed, the feature did not work right away. Some behind-the-scenes magic on Apple’s end was required but, this morning, my patience was rewarded. I woke up and, suddenly, no more “Hey Siri” was required. I raise my wrist, speak, and Siri responds.
A few thoughts on all this:
First things first, I’m learning there is a difference between tilting my wrist to look at my watch and raising my arm and lifting my elbow to bring my Apple Watch towards my mouth. “Raise to Speak” can tell the difference, which is a good thing.
Volume does matter. If I whisper, no matter how close my watch is to my mouth, Siri will not respond. No need to shout, just a normal speaking voice is required.
Other people won’t be triggering Apple Watch Siri. Though anyone’s voice can work, proximity matters. I ran a few experiments and found that the only way someone else in the room could trigger Apple Watch Siri is if they got up close to the watch. Shouting from a few feet away did nothing. The proximity detection is a remarkable piece of work.
So far, “Raise to Speak” has worked flawlessly for me. I’ve tried to break it, I have not yet succeeded. I turned my music way up, had people speaking in the background, Siri understands every word, only kicks in when I lift my arm. They tested this well.
As for “Hey Siri”, you can leave that enabled or turn it off, as you like. In my testing, “Hey Siri” has had no impact on “Raise To Speak”.
The thing I found most interesting about all this was the way it is being rolled out, with the interface leading and the implementation lagging behind, propagating like a change to a domain name server setting. No issue, just interesting.
Bottom line, my “Raise to Speak” experience was all positive. No down side, all magic.
Watch as the Black Rock River in South Africa slowly trickles its way into the Indian Ocean. Once the divide is breached, the trickle turns into a flow, then a torrent.
I was browsing a local online classifieds site and stumbled across a gem: a Macintosh IIsi. Even better, the old computer was for sale along with the elusive but much-desired Portrait Display, a must-have for the desktop publishing industry of its time. I bought it the very next day.
It took me several days just to get the machine to boot at all, but I kept thinking back to that article. Could I do any better? With much less? Am I that arrogant? Am I a masochist?
Cupertino retro-curiosity ultimately won out: I decided to enroll the Macintosh IIsi as my main computing system for a while. A 1990 bit of gear would now go through the 2018 paces. Just how far can 20MHz of raw processing power take you in the 21st century?
If you are even mildly curious about this experiment, I urge you to follow the link. It does not disappoint. A geek’s delight, a worthy rabbit hole.
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive, Skype for Business, and OneNote will install and run on macOS 10.14 Mojave. No formal support is available for Office when using a beta installation of Mojave, and you may encounter stability issues. Microsoft intends to fully support Office 2016, Office 2019 and Office 365 for Mac on 10.14 Mojave when Apple declares it generally available (GA) for all users.
It’ll run, but no formal support until the official Mojave public release.
The 5-year-old and his family had traveled thousands of miles to escape. When they finally arrived on American soil, free from the marauders who had burned their house to the ground, the boy was placed in a holding pen with his brother and sisters, while immigration officials decided their fate.
From this story, a classic piece of music emerged. The family, fleeing religious persecution in Russia in 1893, was soon reunited and allowed to enter the country. And that little boy, born Israel Beilin, would grow up to become Irving Berlin. Twenty-five years after emigrating, the same year he became an American citizen, he composed “God Bless America.”
The song, which rings out with special fervor each Fourth of July as a kind of unofficial national anthem, is turning 100 this year, and at a fraught moment in America’s relations with would-be immigrants, it is worth remembering its origins.
Many know the song. Few know the composer. Even fewer realize he was an immigrant.
For centuries, Europeans had believed that the world was made up of three landmasses: Asia, Africa and Europe, with Jerusalem at its centre. That’s why Italian explorer and coloniser for Spain, Christopher Columbus, had gone to his deathbed just a year earlier believing that where he had landed in the Americas was just another part of Asia. However, this new map depicted a fourth part of the world for the first time. To the left of Europe, it showed a long, thin version of South America, with a small-sized North America above it. The new continent was surrounded by water, and, on the part that is known today as Brazil, the map-makers placed a name: America.
What a fascinating story to read on this July 4th. I hope all of our American readers are having a fun, safe holiday.
A fun read, some things you might not know. My favorite:
How the clock app icon is actually the correct time. But more importantly that the second hand is accurate. It’s actually really useful to have a place to see the seconds.
If you’ve never noticed this before, find the Clock app on your iPhone. Yup, that second hand is live, a red line scooting around the dial.
But even better, make your way over to the app icon blob on your Apple Watch. The clock app icon in that blob also features a live second hand.
‘Raise To Speak’ Siri is a new Apple Watch feature included in the watchOS 5 update that allows you to activate the voice assistant without saying ‘Hey Siri’ or pressing any buttons.
And:
Once the feature is present, using Raise to Speak with Siri is super simple — at least when it works. Simply raise your wrist toward your face as if to check the time, then speak when the display turns on and Siri will activate and listen to what you say.
The devil is in the details here. Key is to keep Siri from firing off, unintentionally, if all I do is raise my wrist to check the time and there’s background noise. Is a timer involved? Or will Siri be poised to respond as long as my wrist is raised?
Obviously, this feature would not have risen to the beta if it didn’t already work well in testing. So I am both optimistic and excited.
You can simply raise your wrist and say “Tell Benjamin I’m running a few minutes late” then Siri will send the message for you — super fast and natural.
This is a perfect example. Enables a more natural interaction and reduces friction. Details.
Sending pictures to others is one of the most basic functions of a smartphone, but when your phone’s texting app starts randomly pushing out photos without your knowledge, you got a problem.
And unfortunately, according to a smattering of complaints on Reddit and the official Samsung forums, it seems that’s exactly what happened to a handful of Samsung phone users, including owners of late model devices such as the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S9.
And:
Samsung Messages, the default texting app on Galaxy devices, which (for reasons that haven’t been determined), is erroneously sending pictures stored on the devices to random contacts via SMS. One user on Reddit even claims that instead of sending one pic, Samsung Messages sent out their entire photo gallery to a contact in the middle of the night.
And:
The scariest part about this bug is that when Samsung Messages bugs out sends pics to other people, it reportedly doesn’t leave any evidence of it doing so, which means people may not know their photos have been released into the wild until it’s too late.
When I was 14, I saved up money from my first web design job to trick out a really nice gaming PC. I outfitted my computer with tons of blue LED fans, and I kept it on at night, right next to my bed. Shortly after, I realized my sleep patterns were changing. While I wasn’t staying awake any later, it now took me longer to get to sleep. Was I eating differently? Was it just a part of being a teenager? Was it the light in my room? But the orange light from my ’80s era alarm clock wasn’t keeping me up. I finally determined that it must be the particular shade of blue light from my new computer. It took me some research to realize all this, but once I did, I started turning my computer off at night. Problem solved. And when I bought my next computer, I ordered fans with orange lights.
I think it’s intuitive that lights would interfere with your sleep pattern, but turns out that blue light “inhibits the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates our sleep cycles.”
There has been a lot of speculation lately that Apple is getting ready to create some media bundle that would be under subscription. According to multiple sites, the idea would be to bundle all of their media properties under a special program that mirrors something like Amazon’s Prime services.
I have no direct knowledge that this will happen but if you read the tea leaves surrounding Apple’s various acquisitions and new media emphasis, it is not too hard to see this possibility.
With that in mind, their most strategic investment so far this year that could be related to this is Texture, the magazine subscription service that has close to 200 magazines in this service for $9.99 a month.
This is one of those things I find most fascinating about Apple – they make acquisitions and decisions that aren’t obvious in the moment but that play out in aggregate over time.
Many manufacturers are already using mobile chips from smartphones in laptops running Google’s Chrome OS, and are starting to put them in laptops running Microsoft Windows. Apple Inc. already designs its own chips, which are arguably the fastest mobile processors in the world—will it use them in its own MacBooks?
And:
Imagine something that looks like a MacBook and works like a MacBook, but has the guts of an iPhone. In addition to things like facial recognition and AR capabilities, it could have longer battery life, built-in always-on connectivity to fast 5G networks, and more.
And:
Last September, Apple declared that its A10X processor, which powers the iPad Pro tablet, was already faster than 80% of the Windows notebooks sold in the past year. The iPhone X’s A11 Bionic is even faster.
And:
“You see Intel delaying new technologies anywhere from six to eight months, and that hurts Apple’s roadmap,” says Ben Bajarin, an analyst at market- research firm Creative Strategies. “Apple in particular doesn’t want to have to be hamstrung.” By using its own silicon, Apple could potentially offer machines that do things other notebook manufacturers might not match for some time, he says.
This is all speculation, not news. Will Apple build a Mac of some stripe with an ARM processor as the main CPU (as opposed to the Touch ID ARM chip in some MacBook Pros, which are task specific)? That does seem to be the way the wind is blowing.
The benefits are clear. More of the stack for Apple to control (though manufactured by TSMC, Apple controls the design of chips like the A11). An ARM chip would bring longer battery life, and could bring mobile capabilities like Face ID and on-chip AI for blazing fast machine learning and augmented reality processing.
Could this yield even thinner laptops? Before they do that, I’d hope that Apple considers making the keyboards and battery easier to replace. I’d gladly give up thinness for a speedier turnaround to fix a problem like that.
Imagine a keynote slide where Phil Schiller explains how much easier a keyboard or battery swap-out will be. That’d get my vote.
Harlan Ellison, the legendary, legendarily irascible speculative fiction writer who died this week at age 84, wrote the greatest episode of Star Trek ever made. And he hated it.
“The City on the Edge of Forever” aired on April 6, 1967, late in the original series’ first season, and won acclaim for capturing everything Star Trek could do at its best while suggesting weighty themes and emotional depths only hinted at in previous episodes. It won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Episodic Drama on Television. Ellison accepted both. Neither salved his bitterness that the episode had been rewritten.
Ellison passed away last week and there are condolences and obituaries of and for him all over the web. But this story encapsulates Ellison for me – a brilliant writer who pissed off almost everyone he came in contact with.
The hand-wringing over these athletic thespians is all too familiar for fans of soccer. It’s now become an infamous part of the game: the anguish. The contortion. The howls of pain. The eye-rolling. It infuriates loyalists and reinforces soccer skeptics. Some Americans frequently cite diving as unfair and unsportsmanlike, and the reason they won’t watch the World Cup. Of course, no one who plays the gentleman’s game openly advocates for such deception, and the rules prohibit this skullduggery. Yet it remains a frequent feature on the pitch.
Despite the (feigned) drama, there is a cold logic behind these actions.
I’m a fair weather soccer fan but am familiar enough with the game to understand why players do it. But the more egregious flops can really take the fun out of watching a game.
Gordon College finance professor Alexander Lowry looks at the history, designs, and security features of the most widely circulated currencies around the world. Lowry begins with the U.S. dollar then moves through the British pound, the euro, the Japanese yen, Chinese yuan, Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, the Indian rupee, the Mexican peso, the Swiss franc, the Swedish krona, and more.
Currency in general fascinates me (who doesn’t like money, amirite) especially the lengths countries go to not only differentiate their currency from others (countries and denominations) but also the security measures they put in place and how they are integrated into the look and feel of a their money.
Apple, it turns out, is aware of this, so It’s re-building the maps part of Maps.
It’s doing this by using first-party data gathered by iPhones with a privacy-first methodology and its own fleet of cars packed with sensors and cameras. The new product will launch in San Francisco and the Bay Area with the next iOS 12 Beta and will cover Northern California by fall.
Every version of iOS will get the updated maps eventually and they will be more responsive to changes in roadways and construction, more visually rich depending on the specific context they’re viewed in and feature more detailed ground cover, foliage, pools, pedestrian pathways and more.
Read the whole article. It’s comprehensive, as seems to be the reroll of Maps. This is Apple owning the process and the data, all with an emphasis on privacy.
Matthew got to ride in the Apple Maps van and got a close up look at the technology and process used to capture the new Apple Maps data. He also had a few visits with the team to learn about New Maps.
Reading this, I’ve got high hopes for New Maps. Looking forward to seeing it in the wild.
This is audio only, but a fascinating insight into the germ of an idea that Steve eventually used to (again) change the world.
From the YouTube writeup:
In 1983, Steve Jobs gave a speech to the International Design Conference in Aspen. The theme of that year’s conference was “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be”.
Steve presented a concept of an online software store. Where one could purchase software, have it sent over a phone line and pay for it with a credit card. In 1983, few thought of this idea. This concept became the Apple app store decades later in 2007.
Ran into this on Reddit, was originally posted back in 2016.
Whilst several Apple executives regularly share updates on social media, with CEO Tim Cook frequently publicising his meetings with app developers and suppliers, and Apple runs various accounts relating to iTunes, Apple Music and other content stores, Apple as ‘the company’ keeps a relatively low profile on social media.
The @Apple Twitter account is nearing 2 million followers, but it has zero actual tweets on its page. However, Apple regularly posts Promoted Tweets to target advertising to certain demographics. It opts to hide these tweets from the public timeline, but there’s actually a way to see them all now, thanks to Twitter’s newly launched Ads Transparency Center.
The article itself is interesting, talking about Twitter’s new ad transparency center. You can look up any Twitter account you like, just swap the account name for the Apple in this URL:
Many past iOS releases let you look up definitions with a built-in dictionary with “Look Up,” but with iOS 12, we get access to a built-in thesaurus as well. As a writer, I find this a godsend. My beloved Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus was one of the casualties of iOS’s transition to 64-bit apps, but now it’s part of the operating system itself.
Even better, the feature works with most iOS word processing apps. The only catch is that you’ll have to turn it on. Here’s how to do it.
Not sure why, but my Thesaurus was enabled already. It might be something I did long ago to add the Thesaurus to my list of iOS dictionaries.
No matter, Leif does a nice walkthrough and if you write on a regular basis, a Thesaurus is a handy thing to have.
Chris MacAskill tells an anecdote about working at NeXT and trying to convince Steve to give a talk at a Unix conference. This is vintage Steve Jobs and, if Steve Jobs history is your thing, well worth the read.
To understand why this matters, watch the video below. The first half shows off Standard AR, where all the virtual objects that populate the scene appear in front of everything else.
The big deal is in the second half, where Pikachu goes in front of some people, but behind others, giving the illusion that Pikachu is actually part of the scene, not on top of the scene.
Not sure how this was done, but this is a bit of a holy grail for AR, especially if the scene analysis and object “occlusion” can be done in real time. As is, this is a proof-of-concept, but that’s not nothing.
