App Store customers around the world made apps and games a bigger part of their holiday season in 2017 than ever before, culminating in $300 million in purchases made on New Year’s Day 2018. During the week starting on Christmas Eve, a record number of customers made purchases or downloaded apps from the App Store, spending over $890 million in that seven-day period.
What an incredible amount of money spent in seven days. Phil Schiller said that developers earned $26.5 billion in 2017, which is more than a 30 percent increase over 2016.
David Gewirtz, writing for ZDNet, made this point about Apple, the Mac, and the emergence of Microsoft’s Surface line:
Think about the Apple of the past, the one fully-focused on the Mac. Would it have allowed Microsoft to gain such innovation ground with the Surface Studio and Surface Book products? Would it have gone years without even processor-bumping its models?
I’ve seen this argument made multiple times recently — that Microsoft’s innovative and deservedly well-regarded Surface lineup was only enabled by Apple taking its collective eye off the ball in the PC space. I don’t buy that at all.
There are two Macs that have languished in recent years: the Mac Pro and Mac Mini. Microsoft’s Surface lineup doesn’t have an entry in either of those categories. The Surface lineup is composed of laptops and the iMac-esque Surface Studio.
This is an interesting discussion. For all its fits and starts, the Surface lineup has matured. Microsoft has poured resources into it, both technically and in marketing.
Take a moment to head over to the official Apple YouTube page. Scroll, then scroll some more. The most recent Mac-specific commercial I see is from six months ago, when the iMac Pro was announced.
Look through the mix of commercials, draw your own conclusion.
The Mac has long had the ability to use your iPhone to make phone calls. But the setup process has changed over time.
If you are new to the setup, this is a terrific walk-through. And if you are an old hand, still worth a scan, just to get a sense of the newest setting options.
Some months ago, I noticed that something was slightly wrong when I was using Google Chrome. I’d type something in the address bar and get the auto-complete suggestions appearing below, but when I arrowed down to select one of the items in the list, I couldn’t tell which was selected. It was as though I’d lost the gray highlight color.
And:
I normally have the background of BBEdit documents set to a very pale yellow, but they had somehow reverted to white. Plus, Web pages with light backgrounds were also showing with a garish, glaring white. Again, restarting and standard troubleshooting made no difference.
Follow the link for the whole detective story, and a lesson learned about Accessibility settings and keyboard shortcuts.
We learned about the issue from a reader who says he purchased an Apple Watch Series 3 for his wife for Christmas so she can conveniently check her messages at work in the ICU. After regularly experiencing reboots every 60-90 minutes when wearing Apple Watch in the ICU setting, they had the Apple Watch replaced with a new unit but the issue persists.
Similar stories have surfaced online since Apple Watch Series 3 launched last fall with a growing number of issues reported in recent days. In response to an Apple Support thread created in October, well over a dozen responses echo the same issue in the same environment.
The solution to avoiding reboots in the ICU environment seems to be using the Apple Watch in airplane mode, although that stops the Apple Watch from receiving alerts.
We lionize the artist and the designer. But few of us ever consider the men and women behind the scenes at a museum, who must deal with packing and unpacking their famous and weirdly-shaped creations, and who must clean them, inspect them, move them around and hang them.
It’s amazing how much work must go into a museum exhibit.
Whenever a family member tells me about something that’s gone haywire on any of their devices, whether it’s an iPhone, iPad, modem, Echo, coffee maker… the first thing I ask is, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” It’s a tried and true method for troubleshooting a lot of glitches in a device’s system. It’s also one of the first things a tech support person will ask you when you call for help.
We’re pleased to announce that Apple Developer Program membership is now available at no cost for eligible organizations. Nonprofit organizations, accredited educational institutions, and government entities based in the United States that will distribute only free apps on the App Store can request to have their annual membership fee waived.
All the information to see if you qualify is available on Apple’s Web site.
Quietly tucked away in a few unassuming buildings in lower Manhattan, massive flows of data pulse through some of the world’s largest and most heavily guarded hubs of global internet infrastructure.
Check out the images. Pretty cool. I wonder how many of these sites there are in the world and how similar they are, design-wise.
With the iMac Pro, you’ll pretty much need to jump through all the hoops iFixit did. That said, the good news is, you can still upgrade the RAM yourself:
We waste no time in testing a little upgrade: How does four 32 GB modules for a “Maxxed” total of 128 GB sound? After speedily reassembling everything, we’re pleased to report that the result is epic.
If the same image is shown on an OLED screen for a long period of time, burn-in effects may set in. This goes for TVs, monitors, and smartphones. It took the iPhone X 510 hours of continuously displaying the exact same image on the iPhone X for burn-in effects to become permanent. That’s Cetizen’s conclusion, and that’s great news for all iPhone X users.
And:
Cetizen stopped at various intervals to check for burn-in traces, but the iPhone X did not show visible effects until hitting the 510-hour mark. The screens on the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S7 Edge, meanwhile, were impacted sooner.
The original site quoted by BGR is in Korean but is pretty understandable if you use Google Translate to translate the page to English. It’d be interesting to see what the burn-in number is for the Pixel 2 XL.
A fundamental design flaw in Intel’s processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.
Programmers are scrambling to overhaul the open-source Linux kernel’s virtual memory system. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to publicly introduce the necessary changes to its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday: these changes were seeded to beta testers running fast-ring Windows Insider builds in November and December.
And:
Similar operating systems, such as Apple’s 64-bit macOS, will also need to be updated – the flaw is in the Intel x86-64 hardware, and it appears a microcode update can’t address it. It has to be fixed in software at the OS level, or go buy a new processor without the design blunder.
The worst news is that since the issue is in the hardware itself, a software patch of something so deeply rooted in the pipeline will cause a performance hit.
Terrible new for Intel. More spark for Apple to roll their own CPUs.
UPDATE:
Finally, macOS has been patched to counter the chip design blunder since version 10.13.2, according to operating system kernel expert Alex Ionescu.
Here it comes. Now that you’ve invested in this useful tech, found a nice place for it in your workflow, we’re going to start serving up ads.
Makes me wonder if the original Echo shipped with a disclaimer that ads might be part of the experience. If not, seems like a liability for Amazon, potential for a law suit. Either way, this seems like a decidedly negative turn in that particular road.
> At first glance, the gaming apps — with names like “Pool 3D,” “Beer Pong: Trickshot” and “Real Bowling Strike 10 Pin” — seem innocuous. One called “Honey Quest” features Jumbo, an animated bear like that one on https://www.fuseanimation.com/why-3d-animation-is-the-alternative/. > > Yet these apps, once downloaded onto a smartphone, have the ability to keep tabs on the viewing habits of their users — some of whom may be children — even when the games aren’t being played.
This is a similar data-farming trick, this time using your phone’s microphone to track your TV watching habits.
> The apps use software from Alphonso, a start-up that collects TV-viewing data for advertisers. Using a smartphone’s microphone, Alphonso’s software can detail what people watch by identifying audio signals in TV ads and shows, sometimes even matching that information with the places people visit and the movies they see. The information can then be used to target ads more precisely and to try to analyze things like which ads prompted a person to go to a car dealership.
Most of this occurs in the Android universe, but some iOS games use Alphonso as well. I’m willing to bet that though the games ask permission to use the microphone, not one of those games adds in, “so we can eavesdrop, track your TV viewing habits”.
This is despicable. Apple should do something about this.
> Mr. Chordia [Alphonso CEO] said that Alphonso has a deal with the music-listening app Shazam, which has microphone access on many phones. Alphonso is able to provide the snippets it picks up to Shazam, he said, which can use its own content-recognition technology to identify users and then sell that information to Alphonso. > > Shazam, which Apple recently agreed to buy, declined to comment about Alphonso.
Fortune has an interesting article asking if Apple has lost its design mojo. There is no doubt some things haven’t worked as well as others, but I don’t agree with everything in story. Instead of picking out a few key paragraphs, you go should go read the entire article to get it all in context.
Music streaming company Spotify was sued by Wixen Music Publishing Inc last week for allegedly using thousands of songs, including those of Tom Petty, Neil Young and the Doors, without a license and compensation to the music publisher.
I don’t know how something like this could possibly happen with a company like Spotify. The entire business is getting licenses to stream music, but apparently they didn’t do that.
We’re excited to share that the buddybuild team has joined the Xcode engineering group at Apple to build amazing developer tools for the entire iOS community.
Once again, the iPhone was the best-selling tech product of 2017, selling more units than the No. 2 through No. 5 products combined.
According to Daniel Ives, an analyst with GBH Insights, who compiled the chart for USA TODAY, Apple will sell 223 million iPhones in 2017, up from 211 million phones the previous year.
Up your password game by ditching the pets names and creating strong, unique passwords with these tools and tips.
It’s pretty safe to say that most people’s passwords suck. There are some good tips in here, and some good apps to utilize. I’ve used 1Password for several years and love it.
A German court has ordered Amazon not to lure internet shoppers to its online marketplace when they mistakenly search for “Brikenstock”, “Birkenstok”, “Bierkenstock” and other variations in Google.
I didn’t think the court could do this, but I guess I was wrong. They are basically telling Amazon that they can’t buy Google Adwords for those misspelled terms.
The actual reason Birkenstock is asking for this makes sense:
Birkenstock sought the injunction because it feared unsuspecting shoppers might buy low-quality counterfeits through Amazon that would erode its reputation.
Amazon said it works to detect fraudulent products from being sold. I’m not sure that’s true either—you can buy that kind of stuff all the time on Amazon.
Here today, gone tomorrow. Our annual Year in Search is always a fun look back at the fads that captured our fancy and then fizzled out fast. See what this year’s biggest crazes were, through the lens of Google Search.
This is just plain interesting. Watch this guy purposely fall through the ice in a lake, just to demonstrate this life-saving technique. Then watch him do it again, still dripping wet, just to emphasize a point.
A solid case study comparing the new iMac Pro, iMac 5K, a 2013 Mac Pro, two flavors of 2010 Mac Pro.
Just one example: In the Final Cut Pro X export test, the iMac Pro is three times as fast as the 2010 Mac Pro. How far we’ve come. Makes me really curious about the performance we’ll (hopefully) see in the 2018 Mac Pro.
Not sure how long this has been the case (likely since the very beginning of share sheets), but this feature is definitely new to me, thought it worth sharing.
Bring up an iOS app, then bring up a share sheet. In the Safari app, bring up a web page, then tap the share icon (square with up arrow) to bring up the Safari share sheet.
Press and hold an icon until it grows slightly, then slide to the left or right to move it to a new location.
This technique works with both the app shelf and the tool shelf.
To see this in action, watch the video in the tweet below:
A few things I’ve learnt recently: 1, you can use drag & drop on the share sheet to rearrange the app choices. This may be common knowledge but is news to me. @davemarkpic.twitter.com/NGtWgorY0F
While I currently use an iPhone 8+, a still have the iPhone SE that I bought in March, 2016. With all of the attention to batteries on the iPhone, I decided to check this device’s battery. It hadn’t seemed particularly slow to me, but the battery hadn’t been lasting a full day for some months before I got the iPhone 8+ and stopped using the SE.
Kirk uses iMazing, a Mac app, to check the iPhone SE battery health (current max charge vs max charge when it was new). If you are thinking about checking and, possibly, replacing your iPhone battery, this is an excellent case study.
Side note: You might also check the Coconut Battery app, which will tell you about your Mac battery, as well as the battery in any USB connected iOS device.
We show how third-party scripts exploit browsers’ built-in login managers (also called password managers) to retrieve and exfiltrate user identifiers without user awareness. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to show that login managers are being abused by third-party scripts for the purposes of web tracking.
To see this for yourself, fire up Safari and go to this demo page.
When the page loads, type in a fake email address and a fake password. Don’t use your real info.
Click the link at the bottom of the page.
Safari will offer to save your password for that site. Click Save.
The demo will then jump to a sniffer page which contains an invisible login form. Safari will helpfully populate the form, and this new demo page will display the sniffed results.
This approach is only possible when a third party has script access to the first-party domain. Thus, our third-party script is only able to recover the credentials you saved for this website (senglehardt.com). It is not possible for us to access credentials for other websites.
So far, your data is visible to a script running on a site with that script installed. The problem is with scripts that run on multiple sites:
We found two scripts using this technique to extract email addresses from login managers on the websites which embed them. These addresses are then hashed and sent to one or more third-party servers. These scripts were present on 1110 of the Alexa top 1 million sites. The process of detecting these scripts is described in our measurement methodology in the Appendix 1. We provide a brief analysis of each script in the sections below.
Bottom line, the scripts are saving hashed (encrypted) versions of surreptitiously harvested login info and comparing it to a saved database of other hashed results. If it finds a match, it knows who you are.
This is all a bit complicated, but my 2 cents, Apple should address this in some way to prevent this form of cross-site tracking.
Those $29 battery out-of-warranty replacements Apple promised are now available for impacted users with an iPhone 6 or later. The company was initially aiming for a late-January timeframe in the States when it first offered up the discount, following blowback against its admission that it had slowed down older model phones to maximize performance.
“We expected to need more time to be ready,” the company said in a statement offered up to TechCrunch this weekend, “but we are happy to offer our customers the lower pricing right away. Initial supplies of some replacement batteries may be limited.”
No word yet on the timing of the battery health iOS software update.
The developer built an app that runs on the iPhone X and uses the face mesh to render your face invisible. A neat trick. Not sure how useful this is, but A for effort.
