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.
On the cover of Van Halen’s 1978 eponymous debut album, Eddie Van Halen thrusts his black-and-white striped instrument towards the camera as if he’s showing you the future. He played this guitar on his unprecedented and mind-blowing instrumental track “Eruption”, hence its nickname, and almost immediately, this monumental instrument became a timeless icon, symbolic of a paradigm shift in guitar-driven rock and roll.
There are three different models of the guitar. One is limited to eight pieces, one 30 pieces and the last one 40 pieces. I want one of these so bad!
While it’s hard to beat the experience of seeing a seminal piece of fine art or important historical artifact with your own two eyes, one could easily spend a lifetime traveling the world in search of all of them. Fortunately, the digital age has made it possible—easy, even—to visit some of the world’s most famous museums from the comfort of your own home. Here are a dozen of them.
There’s nothing like actually visiting one of these museums but I like showing the 12-year-old some of the exhibits in the Louvre, Smithsonian, and NASA museums.
The Yard — one of America’s few “adventure playgrounds.” At this one on a former military base just off of the Brooklyn shoreline, children as young as 6 scurry up piles of tires, pull the stuffing out of old office chairs and use tools to create and destroy whatever they wish. No parents are allowed inside.
The Yard is one result of a growing call to expose kids to more risk, a call that has recently played out from online parenting forums to medical journals.
The much-debated question: Can parents’ efforts to protect their children actually hurt them?
I guess because I’m the “new” father, this place would freak me out to send my child into (I’d still do it) but my wife said she wouldn’t have a problem letting him play in this “risky” playground. I certainly agree with her when she says similar things to this article – we protect children too much at times.
At first blush, this might seem like a typical “Apple is doomed” kind of article. There certainly is a bit of that slant.
But this piece goes a lot deeper than that. There is a lot of detail on the construction of the MacBook butterfly keyboard, the difference between the 1.0 and 2.0 revs, and on exactly why these mechanisms fail when they do fail. With pictures.
A few tidbits, from a much longer story:
The basic flaw is that these ultra-thin keys are easily paralyzed by particulate matter. Dust can block the keycap from pressing the switch, or disable the return mechanism. I’ll show you how in a minute.
And:
So you can’t switch key caps. And it gets worse. The keyboard itself can’t simply be swapped out. You can’t even swap out the upper case containing the keyboard on its own. You also have to replace the glued-in battery, trackpad, and speakers at the same time. For Apple’s service team, the entire upper half of the laptop is a single component. That’s why Apple has been charging through the nose and taking forever on these repairs. And that’s why it’s such a big deal—for customers and for shareholders—that Apple is extending the warranty. It’s a damned expensive way to dust a laptop.
And:
Thin may be in, but it has tradeoffs. Ask any Touch Bar owner if they would trade a tenth of a millimeter for a more reliable keyboard. No one who has followed this Apple support document instructing them to shake their laptop at a 75 degree angle and spray their keyboard with air in a precise zig-zag pattern will quibble over a slightly thicker design.
This is design anorexia: making a product slimmer and slimmer at the cost of usefulness, functionality, serviceability, and the environment.
I hope Apple’s next MacBook and MacBook Pro releases learn a lesson from all this. I hope that the next rev of Apple’s laptops are more easily repaired. I just replaced a fan in an old MacBook Air. It cost me $8 for a new fan and took about 10 minutes to do.
This is better on all sorts of levels. I saved money buying an Apple product, I didn’t lose my laptop for a week, and I was able to keep my laptop alive. I realize that last bit goes against a corporate goal of pushing me to buy, buy, buy, but Apple is better than that. They care about the environment, at the cost of maximizing shareholder value. To me, this is another example of that same tradeoff.
Bottom line, I anxiously await the next generation of MacBooks. I want to believe.
How is it possible that an animal, any animal, can survive the dead of an Antarctic winter? No food, no shelter; just ice, cold, and wind for more than a hundred days straight. But that’s exactly what emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) do—not only surviving, but breeding in one of Earth’s most inhospitable environments.
To the casual observer, the birds appear to just stand around on the ice and endure their frigid world. A longer look, though, reveals that penguins often form tight groups, especially when temperatures plummet. This “penguin huddle” appears to be at the core of the birds’ ability to conserve body heat and survive outside temperatures that would kill most other creatures. But exactly how these huddles function and how they subtly change in shape over time to benefit all members of the group has remained a mystery.
The time lapse video of this phenomenon is fascinating.
> Using the Segments feature in the Apple Watch Workout app is a great way to track changes in exercise intensity over the course of a workout. It can also help you find out which activities in a mixed session push your body the most. > > If your regular running route includes a hilly section, for example, using segments to indicate where it begins and/or ends lets you review how much time it takes to complete compared to the rest of your workout.
Had no idea you could do this. Terrific idea. For me, this would really help with running or swimming, especially if you are doing laps. The convenience of tracking your performance could be further enhanced by resources like the Trusted Casinos Not On Gamstop’s guide, which ensures safe betting environments without the typical restrictions. Perhaps someday we’ll see machine learning that will automatically detect the lap (when you return to the same exact location?) and break your workout into segments automatically.
UPDATE: As it turns out, AppleWatch already does stroke and lap detection (you can tell I am not a swimmer). Yet another reason to appreciate Apple Watch. Take a look at this AppleWatchTriathlete post for details.
Google has finally done what they should’ve done initially: let a group of journalists (two groups actually, one on each coast) actually listen to and participate in live Duplex calls.
Journalists from CNN, Ars Technica, The Verge, Wired, and others all got to participate. John does a nice job working through all the different takes, made for a fascinating read.
From the very end:
Right now it feels like a feature in search of a product, but they pitched it as an imminent product at I/O because it made for a stunning demo. (It remains the only thing announced at I/O that anyone is talking about.) If what Google really wanted was just for Google Assistant to be able to make restaurant reservations, they’d be better off building an OpenTable competitor and giving it away to all these small businesses that don’t yet offer online reservations. I’m not holding my breath for Duplex ever to allow anyone to make a reservation at any establishment.
True, but I don’t think that was the point of the demo. My two cents, this was showing off Google’s ability to mimic a human, well enough to pass a primitive Turing test. Being able to make restaurant reservations is more a proof of concept than an end goal.
To me, we’re far more likely to see a product called Google Help Center, the ability to triage 10,000 simultaneous tech support calls, for free, but with the benefit for Google of being able to harvest all the data gleaned from each interactive session.
You probably already know about Dark Mode and desktop Stacks and Gallery View, but they are just the top-level features in a surprisingly deep update. There are other fun features hiding just beneath the surface.
Here are some of my favorite “hidden” features of the Mojave beta.
Read the post, all good stuff, but this is by far my favorite:
Taking screenshots on the Mac isn’t remotely new, but in Mojave it’s been given a friendly interface, all hiding behind the keyboard shortcut Command-Shift-5.
And:
When you type that shortcut, a floating palette appears that offers you all sorts of options—all of which have been available before, but not in one place. You can grab the entire screen, just a window, or a selection. You can easily change the default folder for saving screenshots, which used to require a trip to the Terminal. You can record video screenshots, which used to require a trip to QuickTime Player. You can take timed screenshots—giving you five or ten seconds to set up the screen exactly as you want it—which was a feature previously available in the venerable Grab utility.
I love this move. The minute you get Mojave installed on your machine (which you’ve carefully backed up), give command-shift-5 a try. Worth it.
Tech has now captured pretty much all visual capacity. Americans spend three to four hours a day looking at their phones, and about 11 hours a day looking at screens of any kind.
So tech giants are building the beginning of something new: a less insistently visual tech world, a digital landscape that relies on voice assistants, headphones, watches and other wearables to take some pressure off our eyes.
And:
Who will bring us this future? Amazon and Google are clearly big players, but don’t discount the company that got us to Peak Screen in the first place. With advances to the Apple Watch and AirPods headphones, Apple is slowly and almost quietly creating an alternative to its phones.
And:
Screens are insatiable. At a cognitive level, they are voracious vampires for your attention, and as soon as you look at one, you are basically toast.
There are studies that bear this out. One, by a team led by Adrian Ward, a marketing professor at the University of Texas’ business school, found that the mere presence of a smartphone within glancing distance can significantly reduce your cognitive capacity. Your phone is so irresistible that when you can see it, you cannot help but spend a lot of otherwise valuable mental energy trying to not look at it.
And:
By placing interior controls on touch screens rather than tactile knobs and switches, carmakers have made vehicles much more annoying and dangerous to interact with. The Tesla Model 3, the most anticipated car on the planet, takes this to an absurd level. As several reviewers have lamented, just about every one of the car’s controls — including adjustments for the side mirrors — requires access through a screen.
This is a terrific read. One quibble for me is the motivation behind moving from real-world, tactile controls to screens. In my mind, it’s not laziness, it’s cost savings. Replacing a knob with a screen setting saves the cost of the knob, as well as the wiring and harness costs, and saves real estate where that button lived. Not to mention the potential for breakage of a moving part.
Follow the money.
That aside, Farhood makes the case for less screens, like so:
If Apple could only improve Siri, its own voice assistant, the Watch and AirPods could combine to make something new: a mobile computer that is not tied to a huge screen, that lets you get stuff done on the go without the danger of being sucked in. Imagine if, instead of tapping endlessly on apps, you could just tell your AirPods, “Make me dinner reservations at 7” or “Check with my wife’s calendar to see when we can have a date night this week.”
To me, that’s the real takeaway. Less screen time without any loss of functionality.
The Mojave release offers a clear look inside Apple’s strategic thinking and the state of the art in 2018—both in what it aspires to deliver and what it doesn’t even make an attempt to do.
The engineering decisions made for the Mac—alongside iOS 12—will shape the future of technology across the next year for the world’s largest and most successful vendor of premium personal computing and mobile enterprise hardware.
Apple is crafting an integrated hardware and software experience that sells you the product, rather than selling “you, the product,” and the result is a rarified, luxurious experience.
Roughly two months after its annual I/O conference, Google this week invited Ars and several other journalists to the THEP Thai Restaurant in New York City.
Over the course of the event, we heard several calls, start to finish, handled over a live phone system. To start, a Google rep went around the room and took reservation requirements from the group, things like “What time should the reservation be for?” or “How many people?” Our requirements were punched into a computer, and the phone soon rang. Journalists—err, restaurant employees—could dictate the direction of the call however they so choose. Some put in an effort to confuse Duplex and throw it some curveballs, but this AI worked flawlessly within the very limited scope of a restaurant reservation.
Reading the reports about this demo are very interesting but it also seems pretty clear this is a long way off from being a real product.
Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd on Wednesday settled a seven-year patent dispute over Apple’s allegations that Samsung violated its patents by “slavishly” copying the design of the iPhone.
In May, a U.S. jury awarded Apple $539 million, after Samsung had previously paid Apple $399 million to compensate for patent infringement. Samsung would need to make an additional payment to Apple of nearly $140 million if the verdict was upheld. How much, if anything, Samsung must now pay Apple under Wednesday’s settlement could not immediately be learned.
This puts the lawsuit to bed – until the next time Samsung copies Apple.
Ever since emoji made their way into the iOS keyboard, I’ve long wanted to create and manage my own list of favorites.
One solution is text substitution, which you can set up on your Mac and sync to iOS. This works, but it’s not really the same thing. I want an actual favorites list that appears right in the keyboard alongside the frequently used emoji.
Sidebar: Each time you select an emoji in macOS or iOS, that emoji is automatically added to the frequently used list, but will eventually fall off the end of the fixed-length list, replaced by the more recently used emoji. A favorite list is permanent. Emoji are favorited until you remove them from the list. The point is, there are two different lists: Frequently Used, and Favorites.
This morning, I was messing with the macOS Mojave beta, and I clicked on the Keyboard Preferences icon in the Mac menu bar. One of the choices in that menu is Show Emoji & Symbols.
If you pick that option, the Character Viewer window will appear. If you tap Emoji in the sidebar, a familiar view of all the Apple emoji will appear. If you tap a particular emoji, a large view of that emoji will appear in the upper right corner.
As an example, here’s the big view of the “hat with bow” emoji:
Note the “Add to Favorites” button under the emoji. Press the button, and a new Favorites category will appear in the Character Viewer window, just above Emoji in the sidebar and just below Frequently Used:
This list of favorites will also appear in the popup viewer, which you bring up by typing control-command-space anytime you are in a text-edit field.
Wonderful! But.
As far as I can tell, and I’ve yet to find anyone on Twitter who has a different experience than me, there’s no way to translate this Favorites list to iOS. This seems an obvious next step (apparently, the favorites button has been part of macOS for some time, not new to Mojave) and my hope is that someone at Apple is working on syncing the emoji favorites list created in macOS with iOS.
In a nutshell, once you have macOS Mojave installed:
Bring up System Preferences
Select Desktop & Screen Saver
Click the Desktop tab
Find a picture with the dynamic desktop icon (a circle with a parabola in the middle) in the upper left corner. Click to select.
As of beta 2, there is only one dynamic desktop set, the one they demoed in the WWDC keynote. But other people have successfully created their own, and seems likely to me we’ll see more before the final Mojave release.
As always, this is beta software, so backup before you install, then proceed with caution.
