Signs and symbols on the sides of ships tell stories about an industry few outsiders understand.
Those who work in ports or on the water have a good view of the proceedings; tugs may have the best view of all. These photos get you closer to ships than most people will ever be.
“The sides of ships have their own sort of beauty,” says photographer David Webster Smith, who is also a San Francisco tugboat engineer. “As soon as I can, I get my camera out.”
I’ve lived in port cities most of my life and, while I’ve seen many of these markings on container ships, I never really paid much attention or knew what they represented. Turns out, they are pretty interesting.
I found this interesting. A short film, with animoji used to deliver the dialog. Wondering if this approach will find its way into a feature film or TV show. Seems to me a logical path for some show on Apple’s content schedule.
Apple’s U.S. customers installed 45 new iPhone apps in 2017, a growth of 10 percent over last year, while Services revenue from In-App Purchases and Subscriptions expanded by 23 percent–driven by games, music and video streaming and dating services. And overall, Apple’s U.S. App Store customers drove significantly higher revenue per user ($58) than Google Play ($38).
Distracted driving is a national epidemic. Our Safe Driving Report revealed that 92% of the drivers in the United States use their phones while behind the wheel.
And:
Taking just five seconds to send or read a text at 55 miles per hour is like driving an entire length of a football field while blindfolded, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The results showed that 70% of EverDrive iPhone users kept their DND feature enabled; one in four (27%) iPhone users disabled the feature. Of those users enabling the feature, phone use while driving decreased by 8%.
A slice of goodness from Apple that puts your safety first, taking steps to actually prevent you from using their product. Will more of this product curbing emerge over time, steps to help reduce smartphone addiction?
As always, gorgeous video but there’s an interesting note included with this one. The pilot, Duncan Sinfield, says:
it’s only a matter of time until the campus becomes shut-off to drones completely… with a geo-fence, or something similar. Security at Apple Park generally responds in two white Prius’s to my precise take-off locations in 10 minutes or less. While this is speculation, my instincts tell me that Apple is tracking all drones in the vicinity of the campus with sophisticated radio frequency technology from companies such as DeDrone (a San Francisco-based aerospace security company). As always, I respect all requests by Apple Security to land my drone and leave the area when asked to do so. They are always asking if I’m an Apple employee too. So to all of the Apple Employees watching (and reading), don’t fly your drones over The Park, it’s frowned upon!
Market Summary – Q4 2017: Apple remained the most profitable brand, capturing 86% of the total handset market profits. Further splitting profits by model, the top 10 models captured 90% of the total handset profits.
iPhone X alone generated 35% of the total handset industry profits. This is a significant landmark, as the model was available in the market for only two months during Q4 2017.
Nothing but good news for Apple and bad news for almost every other manufacturer.
While subtle variations in material, texture, lighting, and even the shape of a product can play tricks on the eyes, every device Apple currently offers or has produced in space gray can be grouped into one of several loosely defined categories. Below, we’ve cataloged and categorized the vast universe of Apple’s recent dark material finishes in an attempt to unravel the mysteries of space gray.
At first blush, this seemed really silly. But on further examination, it’s fascinating how many variations Apple has had for “Space Gray”. You’d think a company renowned for its attention to detail would be more consistent in its colour schemes.
Apple Inc. plans to integrate recently acquired magazine app Texture into Apple News and debut its own premium subscription offering, according to people familiar with the matter. The move is part of a broader push by the iPhone maker to generate more revenue from online content and services.
Texture was all about magazines, but I wonder if Apple will include other forms of media, like paid newspaper subscriptions, as part of this new service.
The phrase “Hey Siri” was originally chosen to be as natural as possible; in fact, it was so natural that even before this feature was introduced, users would invoke Siri using the home button and inadvertently prepend their requests with the words, “Hey Siri.” Its brevity and ease of articulation, however, bring to bear additional challenges. In particular, our early offline experiments showed, for a reasonable rate of correctly accepted invocations, an unacceptable number of unintended activations.
Another fascinating article in Apple’s Machine Learning series. It got a bit dense for me at times (or, rather, I’m a bit dense for the article) but there are lots of interesting tidbits of info included.
Winners of the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes were announced at Columbia University in New York City on Monday. The Pulitzers are highly revered and mark the best in journalism in 14 categories.
Netflix Inc’s blitz of new programming attracted a surprisingly high 7.4 million new customers from January to March, reassuring investors who are betting the video streaming pioneer’s massive spending will fuel growth around the world.
Netflix’s shows are great, as are many of the others put out by similar services. These numbers show how much consumers want these types of shows. This is exactly what Apple is looking to happen when it releases its video content—we’ll see how that works out.
America’s fast-food desserts straddle two very different categories: our country’s most horrific edible disasters and our most cherished culinary treasures. For every gem like the Orange Julius, a pulse-quickening emulsion of citrus and dairy, there is the Burger King Lucky Charms Shake (RIP), a Breaking Bad-like chemistry experiment gone wrong. There are the old nostalgic treats, like that McDonald’s soft serve, that don’t stand the test of time — and others, like the Taco Bell cinnamon twists, that do.
This is a ranking of those treats.
A surprisingly fun (and possibly horrifying) read. And now I’m hungry.
This detailed tutorial really puts Workflow through its paces. If you’ve not yet spent quality time with the iOS Workflow app, this is a wonderful way to get started. Nice job by iMore’s Matthew Cassinelli.
First things first, I do love these deep dives by people like Guilherme Rambo. This is not a leak, but more of a grind-it-out, pay attention to the details analysis.
In this case, Guilherme came upon some code with a log message that said:
“This is where the 3rd party face config bundle generation would happen”
From Guilherme:
It’s clear from the wording of the message that this feature is not implemented at the moment, but it’s definitely something Apple has planned. This new capability could come as soon as watchOS 5, or be dropped altogether. I personally hope they go forward with it since it’d be pretty cool to be able to install new watch faces on my Apple Watch.
This is a fascinating piece, a step-by-step on how something promising went south. This is a group interview, with notables like former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, Facebook ad-tech entrepreneur Antonio García Martínez, virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, free software activist Richard Stallman, and many more.
The flow of this article is, how things went wrong in 15 steps. Terrific read.
Here’s a cool list of the different jobs on a movie set and how they fit into the system.
Gunn posted this on Twitter and not only is it an interesting breakdown of the jobs on a film set but many of them are further linked to descriptions of the job. So, if you’ve ever wondered what the Best Boy Grip does and whether you’re qualified for the position, this is the chart for you.
All of us, adults and children, have had our lives transformed in the decade since the iPhone was unveiled. Now we have always-connected email, messaging, shopping, banking and so on, in addition to social, gaming and entertainment apps. Many of these seem benign, but we use them more than we know.
What does a healthy, moderate digital life look like?
I believe that for Apple to maintain and even grow its customer base it can solve this problem at the platform level, by empowering users to understand more about how they use their devices. To do this, it should let people track their digital activity in detail and across all devices.
Considering the market share, I always bristle whenever a pundit says, “Apple needs to solve this problem…” instead of at least including Google and Android in the discussion. But there’s no doubt that Apple, with its stated concerns about user privacy and demonstrated control over all aspects of the iPhone, is uniquely situated to at least begin the discussion on these issues.
The specifics of Huseby’s legal case apply only in Norway, of course, but his case speaks to a problem faced by independent iPhone repair shops around the world. Apple’s use of the legal system and trademark law turns average repair professionals into criminals and helps the company corner the repair market for Apple products.
This is just one of many cases that will need to be adjudicated before the issue is settled but I think, in the long run, Apple will lose this fight.
Among the casualties of the impending transition to 64-bit apps is one long-lasting oddity: QuickTime 7 Pro.
What makes this app so unusual are a few factors. For one thing, it’s one of Apple’s own apps. For another, it was first released in 2005, making it almost 13 years old, though it hasn’t seen an update in about 8 years.
But despite its age and the fact that the writing was on the wall for QuickTime 7, news that it wouldn’t see an update when macOS makes the jump to all-64-bit-all-the-time sparked some cries of frustration from users, including both myself and Jason, who have carved out a place in their workflows—and their hearts—for this little anachronism.
Probably the single thing that pisses me off most about the (completely understandable) move to all 64-bit is that Apple has crippled QT over the years and is now forcing us to use less suitable and functional apps. QuickTime Player X is utterly useless as a production app.
Leakers do not simply lose their jobs at Apple. In some cases, they face jail time and massive fines for network intrusion and theft of trade secrets both classified as federal crimes. In 2017, Apple caught 29 leakers. 12 of those were arrested. Among those were Apple employees, contractors and some partners in Apple’s supply chain. These people not only lose their jobs, they can face extreme difficulty finding employment elsewhere. “The potential criminal consequences of leaking are real,” says Tom Moyer of Global Security, “and that can become part of your personal and professional identity forever.”
I have a hard time understanding the motivation for employees to leak information about upcoming products. I think this is a smart move by Apple, telling its employees that there are consequences for their actions. The fact that 12 people were arrested should scare the hell out of anyone considering leaking information.
Apple is not fucking around anymore. You’ve been warned.
ESPN+ is launching at a price of $4.99 a month, or $49.99 a year. Available on iOS, Android, Apple TV, Amazon’s Fire TV, and Chromecast, it’s not a standalone experience, but rather part of an updated version of the same ESPN app that provides some free features and (if you authenticate as a paying customer) full programming from ESPN in its traditional linear-TV form.
Even if ESPN+ isn’t meant to immediately usher in a radically new era for ESPN, it’s the first taste of a big change for Disney.
Meaning, this is a test bed for where Disney wants to go with its own content.
Police forces and federal agencies around the country have bought relatively cheap tools to unlock up-to-date iPhones and bypass their encryption, according to a Motherboard investigation based on several caches of internal agency documents, online records, and conversations with law enforcement officials.
And:
Regional police forces, such as the Maryland State Police and Indiana State Police, are procuring a technology called ‘GrayKey’ which can break into iPhones, including the iPhone X running the latest operating system iOS 11.
Is this whack-a-mole? Will Apple be able to change iOS to break GrayKey? And, if so, how long will it take for GrayKey, or another technology, to ship a replacement?
Chinese police have used facial recognition technology to locate and arrest a man who was among a crowd of 60,000 concert goers.
The suspect, who has been identified only as Mr Ao, was attending a concert by pop star Jacky Cheung in Nanchang city last weekend when he was caught.
Police said the 31-year-old, who was wanted for “economic crimes”, was “shocked” when he was caught. China has a huge surveillance network of over 170 million CCTV cameras.
People are remarkably good at focusing their attention on a particular person in a noisy environment, mentally “muting” all other voices and sounds. Known as the cocktail party effect, this capability comes natural to us humans. However, automatic speech separation — separating an audio signal into its individual speech sources — while a well-studied problem, remains a significant challenge for computers.
This is a major hurdle for smart speakers like HomePod and Google Home. While this post focuses on the cocktail party problem (separating individual voices when multiple people are speaking), it is part of a longer problem thread, that of identifying an individual speaker’s voice.
Consider HomePod. If HomePod Siri knew who was speaking, she could be more specific in her response. If I ask Siri to send a text, Siri could look up contacts in my database, but if my wife asked, Siri could use her contact database.
Google Home already solves this problem. And they are well on their way to solving the cocktail party problem as well.
Imagine a day when hearing aids feature the technology to distinguish speakers, offer signal boost on a voice-by-voice basis, let you know who said what, perhaps with the aid of your iOS device.
If this interests you, there’s a series of videos embedded in the Google blog post that shows the current cocktail party tech in action.
