To be practical, an iPad photography workflow has to encompass everything from shooting, importing, culling, editing, and the final export. The ideal scenario is to be able to trust the iPad to replace a laptop as my daily photography companion. It needn’t do so entirely — I’m happy to continue using my desktop-based collection of apps when I’m at home and need their specific capabilities — but I should feel confident taking nothing but an iPad with me when I head out on a shoot or take my next trip.
Things aren’t perfect yet, but depending on your tolerance for doing things differently, we’re finally at a place where the iPad is a viable companion for the working photographer.
During my recent trip to Australia, my workflow was blown up by a busted MacBook Air screen so I had to jury-rig a solution that, in some ways, mirrored not only the solutions found in this piece but the frustrations as well.
Over the weekend, someone started a thread asking why an artist’s album view in Apple Music has gotten so cluttered.
To see this for yourself, pick a relatively modern artist and check out their list of albums in the Music app. For example, fire up Siri and say:
Show me all the Bruno Mars albums
When the Bruno Mars page appears, scroll down to the Albums section and tap See All. Amongst the actual Bruno Mars albums, you’ll find a lot of singles and EPs. Way more singles and EPs than actual albums, in fact.
Now it certainly is great to have a complete list of all of Bruno Mars’ music at your fingertips. But sometimes you want to find an album. And there is a lot of clutter.
Personally, I think it’d be nice if there was some way to declutter the list, have a view without all the duplicated remixed singles.
With digital music, everything has changed. When you see a bit of text on a website or in iTunes, all you know is the name of the release and its artist. David Bowie’s Let’s Dance could be a single, an EP, or an Album. This is because the tags – the metadata that identifies music – doesn’t allow for this type of differentiation. iTunes uses a simplified version of the ID3 tagging system, which doesn’t offer a tag to identify what type of release a record is. (MusicBrainz does use a tag called Release Group, which can be used to distinguish between singles, albums, and EPs, but also broadcasts and “other.”)
So how can you distinguish between these different formats in digital? The only way is if the record label has tagged the name of a release with the word “Single” or “EP.”
Bottom line, this is not a trivial problem to solve. Not, at least, without the cooperation of the labels. But seems to me, this is a problem worth solving. And if I, as a human, can step through an artists list of albums/EPs/singles and quickly suss out which items on the list are albums, surely this is the kind of problem that would yield to a well applied bit of machine learning.
And once Apple Music knows the difference between albums, singles, EPs, etc., it’d be easy enough to add a filter to let me search through only albums, or only singles for that matter.
I have the great honor of working as part of the Technology Evangelism group at Apple. Involvement in the annual WWDC conference is one of the key efforts by the team each year, and I was really taken by the conference this year. The developers I met were simply amazing, the team behind the conference immensely talented, and the conference branding and theme also spoke to me very deeply.
As someone who came into technology from the arts, and endeavors to bring the best of both disciplines into everything I do, it struck a chord in my heart. Embracing creativity and innovation, consider adding a personal touch to your gestures, like sending new baby cookies as a gift, to celebrate life’s special moments in a heartfelt way.
And:
I wanted to create something of a keepsake for each of the other members of our team as a personal gift to each of them. I’ve always loved the aesthetic of the Apple Design Award, and wanted to create something of an homage to that design, but using my favourite material: wood.
Read the post, take a look at the pictures. What an amazingly thoughtful gift. So cool.
You’ve seen the video. Everyone on the internet has. A man sits in a cubicle and pounds his keyboard in frustration. A few seconds later, the Angry Man picks up the keyboard and swings it like a baseball bat at his screen—it’s an old PC from the ’90s, with a big CRT monitor—whacking it off the desk. A frightened coworker’s head pops up over the cubicle wall, just in time to watch the Angry Man get up and kick the monitor across the floor. Cut to black.
Most of us have seen and laughed at this grainy video but I had no idea it was staged.
Once you install the app, launch it, then scroll down, just a bit, to the section with the white box that asks, “Is your portrait in a museum?”
Tap to get started, give Google access to your camera, take a selfie, then let the app do its thing. My sense is that the matching algorithm keys in on your hair, including any facial hair.
Interesting idea. Wondering what Google does with all the selfies it harvests.
A pair of amateur explorers in Canada have found a vast underground passage stretching hundreds of metres underneath the bustling streets of Montreal whose formation dates back more than 15,000 years ago to the Earth’s last ice age.
And:
Formed thousands of years ago by massive glaciers that ruptured the rock beneath, yellow calcite line the walls of the passage at times, adding pops of bright colour while icicle-shaped stalactites hang overhead.
I find it incredible that such a massive complex underground tunnel has been hidden for so long. An amazing find.
Ten years ago today, I was in the audience when Jobs introduced the Air. I was skeptical at the time (the work I was doing “required” the power of a full-sized laptop. At the time, I was lugging around a 17″ MacBook Pro) but now I love my Air, especially when I travel.
One of the most original and distinctive songs Led Zeppelin ever recorded was the exotic, eight-and-a-half minute “Kashmir,” from the 1975 album Physical Graffiti. In this clip from Davis Guggenheim’s film “It Might Get Loud”, Jimmy Page explains the origins of the song to fellow guitarists Jack White and The Edge. Then Page demonstrates it by picking up an old modified Danelectro 59DC Double Cutaway Standard guitar that he played the song with on some of Led Zeppelin’s tours.
One of the best music documentaries I’ve ever seen is “It Might Get Loud” – Jimmy Page, Jack White, and The Edge just sitting around, talking about playing guitar – and this segment of Page talking about one of the most distinctive riffs in music is a great example of it.
When my phone is in my pocket, I tend to hold it like a gadget security blanket, and I sometimes end up squeezing the side buttons. This was never a problem until I got the iPhone X, which has some new features tied to those side buttons. More specifically, if you press and hold both the power button and a volume button for a few seconds, your phone will call 911 and/or your designated emergency contacts.
I’ve never done this, but a friend of mine had an iPhone X in a car phone mount and it slid down during the drive, pushing both buttons, and automatically called 911.
As it continues to showcase new types of content in the App Store, Apple has recently started highlighting popular subscription applications with free trials. The new section is located under the “Apps” section in the App Store and aptly titled “Try It For Free.”
Since 1889, the General Pencil Company has been converting huge quantities of raw materials (wax, paint, cedar planks, graphite) into products you can find, neatly boxed and labeled, in art and office-supply stores across the nation: watercolor pencils, editing pencils, sticks of charcoal, pastel chalks. Even as other factories have chased higher profit margins overseas, General Pencil has stayed put, cranking out thousands upon thousands of writing instruments in the middle of Jersey City.
Pencils are one of those things few of us give any thought to – or, for that matter, use much any more – but this glorious photo essay will definitely get you thinking about the “lowly” pencil.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson: “I typed Episode VIII out on a MacBook Air. For security it was ‘air-gapped’ — never connected to the internet. I carried it around and used it for nothing except writing the script. I kept it in a safe at Pinewood Studios. I think my producer was constantly horrified I would leave it in a coffee shop.”
I bet a lot of people in his industry do similar things, especially for blockbusters.
This is a phenomenal image from our collective history. This is Susan Kare, designer of the original Mac icons (and so much more) in her office, back in the early days of Macintosh.
There’s a lot of detail here. Check the Mac on the shelf with the color Mac logo. What model is that?
And zoom in (tap the image for a higher rez version) on that piece of graph paper taped above the computer. Is that some kind of icon code? An ASCII table?
Check out the toys on the shelf, the books. It’s all such a moment in time.
UPDATE: Some cool feedback from some folks who lived this history.
First things first, the photo originated in Cabel Sasser’s Twitter feed (thanks for the heads up, Cabel!), as seen here:
I found a higher-res version of that photo of coolest-person @SusanKare, and I wish I could zoom and enhance on every single toy, note, and scrap of paper. I can only make out the "1983-84 Texaco-Metropolitain Opera Radio Broadcast Schedule". https://t.co/2mKzZNtJgX
Read down Cabel’s post for replies from Susan Kare herself, along with Chris Espinosa and lots of other folks. Some great reading.
And, as a bonus, here are some pics I took of Susan Kare’s original design notebook when it was on display at the Museum of Modern Art a few years back.
If you have an Apple Watch, you already know that incoming phone calls and FaceTime calls will ring on your watch alongside your iPhone, so you can answer the call and talk on your wrist, Dick Tracy style. Switching the call back to your iPhone once you’ve answered it is straightforward enough as well — simply tap the green bar that appears at the top of the home screen to open the Phone app and transfer the call to there in one fell swoop. What you may not know, however, is that you can also send calls in the other direction — transfer an in-progress call from your iPhone over to your Apple Watch.
Great tip, especially if you have a cellular Series 3 Apple Watch.
UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments, not likely you’ll be able to use this technique to jump from the iPhone’s cellular connection to the Apple Watch Series 3’s own cellular capability. Good point.
One of the most important witnesses to the rape and homicide of a 19-year-old-woman in Germany might be a stock app on the iPhone of her alleged murderer.
Hussein K., an Afghan refugee in Freiburg, has been on trial since September for allegedly raping and murdering a student in Freiburg, and disposing of her body in a river.
And:
He refused to give authorities the passcode to his iPhone, but investigators hired a Munich company (which one is not publicly known) to gain access his device, according to German news outlet Welt. They searched through Apple’s Health app, which was added to all iPhones with the release of iOS 8 in 2014, and were able to gain more data about what he was doing that day. The app records how many steps he took and what kind of activity he was doing throughout that day.
The app recorded a portion of his activity as “climbing stairs,” which authorities were able to correlate with the time he would have dragged his victim down the river embankment, and then climbed back up. Freiburg police sent an investigator to the scene to replicate his movements, and sure enough, his Health app activity correlated with what was recorded on the defendant’s phone.
This is two stories. First and foremost, there’s the use of HealthKit data in a murder/rape trial. But underneath is the question of how the unnamed German firm was able to get into the phone.
It is easy to say that because Apple was never present at CES that the show didn’t mean something to them or their ecosystem. It is easy, and correct to say that CES was not, or never was, a measure of the health of Apple’s products. It is, however, incorrect and dangerous to miss that CES had been, for some time, a barometer for the health of Apple’s ecosystem.
Now make your way through the linked MacStories roundup of cool CES gadgets and accessories. It does seem like the vast majority of CES announcements I’ve seen are Alexa first, HomeKit second.
Not sure I agree that this is a barometer of the health of Apple’s ecosystem. Instead, I see it as a marker of where the puck is now, not where it is going to be. Apple Watch is a perfect example of this. When Apple Watch first hit, it was lost in the glut of watch product. Over time, Apple Watch proved itself as a well designed, thoughtful product, while many of the cheap, competing products are no longer around.
Not saying that Alexa won’t win. But I am saying that it is simply too early to tell how this will all shake out.
Apple began notifying Chinese iCloud customers of the forthcoming handoff of its cloud service to the Chinese company Guizhou on the Cloud Big Data (GCBD), which will take over local operations starting February 28. However, TechCrunch reported that some non-Chinese iCloud accounts have been notified of this change. Some users with US-based billing addresses and connections to the US App Store received the notification email stating the physical location of their iCloud data will change come February.
So there are people who do not (or no longer) reside in China, but their iCloud accounts will be force migrated.
According to Apple’s help page on the issue, your iCloud’s country or region setting dictates whether or not your account will be part of the migration.
Interesting. And I’ve read that China is cracking down on people who live in China but change their region code so their data remains outside the country.
If you don’t live in China, but your data is tagged for movement, consider changing your region code, as discussed in this support page.
Gone are the days of Apple’s presence, or observably “winning” of CES, even though they are not present. It was impossible to walk the show floor and not see a vast array of interesting innovations which touched the Apple ecosystem in some way. Now it is almost impossible to walk the floor and see any products that touch the Apple ecosystem in any way except for an app on the iOS App Store. The Apple ecosystem is no longer the star of CES but instead things like Amazon’s Alexa voice platform, and now Google’s assistant voice platform is the clear ecosystem winners of CES.
Ben says that Apple is not doomed, and he’s right. However, this is not a good sign for Apple.
When design leads to friendship, and that friendship leads back to design, magic happens. This is the story of how an intern and her mentor designed Apple’s original emoji set and together changed the way people communicate around the world. It was also a project that led them to become lifelong friends, a key ingredient in the success of these tiny icons. In a nutshell, I was the intern and Raymond is my lifelong friend and mentor. In the course of three months, together we created some of the most widely used emoji: face with tears of joy, pile of poo, red heart, and party popper, plus around 460 additional ones. Later, as a full time Apple employee, I even got to create a few more.
It’s hard to remember a time without the ability to add an Emoji to a conversation on the iPhone.
For all you kids out there, gather round: history time. We once used to buy things called “rolls of film”. We then had to put these rolls in our cameras. These rolls had finite space for photos, and when they were full, we’d take them and get them developed into tangible photographs (usually on glossy photo paper). I know. Whoa.
I didn’t know people still wondered about these services, but a friend of mine just asked me about this the other day.
Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Thursday it had already deployed software patches against the Spectre and Meltdown chipset security flaws last year, without slowing down its cloud services.
Researchers with Google’s Project Zero, in conjunction with academic and industry researchers from several countries, first reported the flaws publicly on Jan. 3, but major tech firms have said they knew about the flaws months ago.
Motherboard: On Wednesday, at the International Conference on Cyber Security in Manhattan, FBI forensic expert Stephen Flatley lashed out at Apple, calling the company “jerks,” and “evil geniuses” for making his and his colleagues’ investigative work harder. For example, Flatley complained that Apple recently made password guesses slower, changing the hash iterations from 10,000 to 10,000,000. >
“At what point is it just trying to one up things and at what point is it to thwart law enforcement?” he added. “Apple is pretty good at evil genius stuff.”
At what point is it just Apple trying to protect its customers from nefarious forces that, sadly nowadays, include governments?
