Christian Zibreg, iDownloadBlog, on Apple Watch theater mode:

Activated via a brand new toggle in Control Center, Theater Mode puts your wearable device into silent mode while keeping the screen dark until you tap it or press the Digital Crown or the Side button.

Read the post for all the details, including some nice screen shots and a video that shows theater mode in action.

In a nutshell, you drag up on your Apple Watch screen to bring up control center. Tap the theater mode icon (orange, with two theater masks) to bring up a splash screen with a theater mode button. Tap the button and theater mode is enabled.

In theater mode, your watch screen will not light up in response to notifications or a wrist flick. You’ll need to tap the screen or press the Digital Crown or side button to turn it on.

Two things:

1. Not sure we need the splash screen button press to enable theater mode. Hopefully, this is a temporary extra step. I turn airplane mode on and off without the confirming splash screen. Works just fine.

2. Does the UK interface say “Theatre Mode”? Just curious.

UPDATE: And the answer is, Theater Mode in the US and Cinema Mode in the UK. [H/T Vincent Ritter]

Rich McCormick, The Verge:

Twitter’s vice president of engineering, Ed Ho, has promised to make changes to the service to combat harassment as soon as this week. Speaking on Twitter, Ho said that the company would be rolling out a number of product changes “in the days ahead,” including “long overdue fixes to mute/block” features, and new measures designed stop serial abusers from creating new accounts.

Ho said that making Twitter safer was the company’s primary focus at the moment, and acknowledged its failures in the past to protect users from threats, insults, and other harassment. “We heard you, we didn’t move fast enough last year,” Ho wrote in a threaded series of tweets. “Now we’re thinking about progress in days and hours not weeks and months.”

Here’s a link to the start of Ed Ho’s twitter thread.

And here’s Jack Dorsey’s clarifying retweet:

We’re taking a completely new approach to abuse on Twitter. Including having a more open & real-time dialogue about it every step of the way

We shall see.

Jean-Louis Gassée, writing for Monday Note:

Here in the Valley tech CEOs are taken to task for their timid protests against the latest bout of xenophobia. ‘It’s not a policy we support’, or ‘this is not the best way’, or ‘we’re concerned’.

I don’t think this is the right perspective. We’ve seen how a Trump tweet can hurt a company and its shareholders. A responsible CEO shouldn’t expose his constituents to irrational wrath. We’ve seen, during the transition, how Trump berated and threatened media executives in off-the record exchanges. Imagine the scenario I saw on Twitter (but can’t find for proper attribution — update: it was @counternotions). Someone calls Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, and in a heavy mafia voice tells him ‘Nice little bidness you have here, be a shame if anything happened to it’. This because Comcast owns NBC and NBC runs Saturday Night Live and its sharp Trump parodies. They hurt their target’s needy ego — because they do what caricatures do, give relief to a truth.

Jean-Louis is not suggesting tech CEOs should lay down. Far from it. Read the post. A thoughtful perspective.

Want to listen in? The call will be live streamed here.

Want a bit of detail on what’s expected, what’s at stake? Joe Rossignol pulled together this post for Mac Rumors that does a nice job laying everything out.

As the Super Bowl countdown begins, Siri is gearing up for the Big Game. For the first time, Apple TV users can now ask Siri to tune in live to the Super Bowl just by saying, “Watch the Super Bowl.” Whether you’re at home, at a local sports bar or at a friend’s party, Siri is available everywhere you are and provides even more football insights including team rosters, player comparisons, historical stats, season records and more.

What a great idea by Britain’s Royal Mail.

An Argentine prosecutor asked a judge on Monday to jail local executives of ride-hailing company Uber Technologies Inc and a court ordered the company’s mobile application to be shut down following protests from taxi drivers’ unions.

On one night — November 5, 2016 — iPhone photographers canvassed the globe, from Arctic ice caves and Indonesian volcanoes, to the clubs of Johannesburg and rooftops of Shanghai. For the latest “Shot on iPhone” campaign, Apple enlisted a group of photographers to capture life from dusk to dawn using the low-light camera on iPhone 7. The people, sights and scenes they encountered over the course of the night resulted in a spectacular display of nighttime photography, which will be displayed in 25 countries beginning today.

Very impressive.

Medium:

No matter what media stream you depend on for news, you know that news has changed in the past few years. There’s a lot more of it, and it’s getting harder to tell what’s true, what’s biased, and what may be outright deceptive. While the bastions of journalism still employ editors and fact-checkers to screen information for you, if you’re getting your news and assessing information from less venerable sources, it’s up to you to determine what’s credible.

Even if we didn’t find ourselves in these challenging times for accuracy in the media, this is still good advice.

The Verge:

The screen is curved, which means that it picks up and seemingly magnifies every glimmer of light in the room. Because that’s what you want in a television screen. The curved screen demands that you sit dead center of the TV unless you want to observe the equally frustrated facial expressions of the person sitting opposite you on the couch trying in vain to see through the glare. The glare is ridiculous. It’s so completely terrible that I give up after watching something for 30 seconds and walk away whisper-yelling swears at my sucker of a husband for bringing this piece of shit into my home. This television makes me hiss in anger.

Give Patel props for giving his wife a platform. It also confirms what I’ve always suspected about curved screen TVs.

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Rob Griffiths:

This post isn’t about the movie. It’s about a book about the making of the movie, written by Cary Elwes, who starred as Westley, aka The Man in Black. And in the interest of thoroughness, the book’s full title isn’t As You Wish, it’s As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride.

And:

what really made the book for me were all the quotes that Cary secured from others involved in the production. These are present throughout the book, and you seldom need read more than a page before encountering one.

If you are a fan of The Princess Bride (and who isn’t?), this is a terrific read and, I suspect, would make a great gift.

Even better, consider upgrading to the audio book. According to Paul Goracke, the audiobook is not only narrated by Cary, but by the cast members (except Mandy and, of course, Andre).

Here’s an Amazon link to the book. And here’s a link to the audio book. Click on the “Audio Sample” button to get just a taste.

Inconceivable!

Steffen Reich pulled together a nice post on the advantages of sharing from device to device using the oft-neglected AirDrop. A nice set of use cases here. Well done, Steffen.

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

Apple has inexplicably removed the iCloud Activation Lock status page, which used to exist at iCloud.com/activationlock, but that URL now leads to a 404 error instead. The utility let anyone type in the IMEI or serial number of an iOS device to find out if Activation Lock had been turned off, handy to verify the authenticity of a seller when buying a used iPhone online.

Not clear why this has happened. Wondering if the tool was being misused in some way. I suspect the story will emerge over the next few days. Keep an eye out.

UPDATE: And here’s the proof, a video that shows how to unlock an iPad by cloning the iPad drive and changing the serial number to a valid unlocked serial number, one checked/validated using the Apple activation lock tool (about 5:28 into the video).

[Big hat tip to Loop reader Robert Davey]

If you are a Twitter user, take a minute to visit this page and verify the list of apps that have access to your account, have the right to read and write tweets, send direct messages on your behalf.

See an app you don’t recognize? Press the revoke access button. You can always add it back in later.

Tim Cook, in an email to employees:

Team,

In my conversations with officials here in Washington this week, I’ve made it clear that Apple believes deeply in the importance of immigration — both to our company and to our nation’s future. Apple would not exist without immigration, let alone thrive and innovate the way we do.

I’ve heard from many of you who are deeply concerned about the executive order issued yesterday restricting immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. I share your concerns. It is not a policy we support.

There are employees at Apple who are directly affected by yesterday’s immigration order. Our HR, Legal and Security teams are in contact with them, and Apple will do everything we can to support them. We’re providing resources on AppleWeb for anyone with questions or concerns about immigration policies. And we have reached out to the White House to explain the negative effect on our coworkers and our company.

As I’ve said many times, diversity makes our team stronger. And if there’s one thing I know about the people at Apple, it’s the depth of our empathy and support for one another. It’s as important now as it’s ever been, and it will not weaken one bit. I know I can count on all of you to make sure everyone at Apple feels welcome, respected and valued.

Apple is open. Open to everyone, no matter where they come from, which language they speak, who they love or how they worship. Our employees represent the finest talent in the world, and our team hails from every corner of the globe.

In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, “We may have all come on different ships, but we are in the same boat now.”

Tim

These are extraordinary times. As much disinformation as information. Pressures from every side. I do not envy Tim Cook his position in all this.

mobiography:

Christian Feichtner lives in Vienna, Austria. He has been a photographer for many years and used to work as an event and concert photographer during the 2000’s. Since that time his interests have gravitated towards travel photography and iPhone photography.

The “sexy” headline notwithstanding, the interview is an interesting look at a particular style of photography and the power of the iPhone coupled with an in-depth knowledge of the camera and photography in general.

[Via 512 Pixels]

Apple has joined the Partnership on AI as a founding member. The company has been involved and collaborating with the Partnership since before it was first announced and is thrilled to formalize its membership alongside Amazon, Facebook, Google/DeepMind, IBM, and Microsoft.

Thanks to Ingage for sponsoring The Loop this week.

A new iPad app called Ingage hit the App Store this week that lets anyone easily create and share interactive presentations, portfolios, real estate listings, product catalogs and more, without needing a designer or developer.

Simply drag and drop photos and videos into Ingage’s interactive page templates to bring your content to life. Videos become touchable product 360s, virtual walkthroughs or time lapse demonstrations. Images are layered with pop-up hotspots or scrubbable before and afters.

While you build on an iPad, the software automatically creates a responsive HTML webpage of your interactive presentation that can be viewed by anyone, on any device. Sharing is done with just a tap with an instantly formatted text message, email or social media post. Any changes to your content are instantly reflected anywhere it’s been shared.

The app is free to download from the App Store, where you can currently find it featured on the homepage under “New Apps We Love.”

Click here to download Ingage.

Robservatory:

An ideal rip would be one that happens in seconds, saves into a 10KB file, and has quality matching the original. The reality, though, is far from the ideal. Ripping a movie involves making trade-offs between those three competing measures: Maximizing any one measure requires some sort of tradeoff with one or both of the other measures.

After ripping so many DVDs and Blu-rays over the years, I was curious about how HandBrake and Don Melton’s Video Transcoding tools handle those tradeoffs, so I decided to do some testing.

A friend of mine used to be the “encoding Guy” at Apple back in the early days of the iTunes store. He described encoding as “a Black Art. You don’t have to kill a goat at midnight under a full moon to get it right but it helps”. Griffiths does a good job at explaining what happens when you encode, why it happens and what to expect, quality and file size wise.

Quartz:

When Nike named Mark Parker their CEO in 2006, one of the first things Parker did was call Apple CEO Steve Jobs for business advice. It might not have seemed it, but at the time Nike was struggling.

Yes, they had a successful brand. But they were failing to fit their digital strategy into their line of literally hundreds of thousands of products.

During their call, Steve Jobs gave one piece of advice that stuck with Parker.

The advice, while perhaps specific to business, fits in with a lot of our personal lives, too.

Jennifer Harrison:

First look at this star sitting 129 light-years away in the Pegasus constellation. It’s called HR 8799, circled and labelled “8799”. It’s a young star and really bright. Astronomers have been studying it for exoplanets for a few years. Hold onto your hats.

With all the political insanity going on, I really appreciate these kinds of stories that take me out of the day to day crap we’re going through. The images of theses planets circling HR 8799 is incredible.

Tony Heupel committed and moved away from the Apple ecosystem, embracing a platform agnostic lifestyle wherever possible. Long story short, Tony and his family are back (mostly).

This is a very interesting read. Lots of detail on where the non-Apple universe fell short, and where Apple’s approach really does make a difference.

OS X Daily:

With Power Reserve Mode enabled, Apple Watch will cease all functions except a limited onscreen clock display. While you can enter Power Reserve at any time, this is not something you’d probably use for fun since it disables basically all features of Apple Watch like fitness tracking and heart rate monitoring, messaging, notifications, etc. With that said, it’s an incredibly effective way to continue to use the Apple Watch as a time-telling device in situations when it would otherwise run out of battery.

Good to know how to do this.

iOS developer Genady Okrain writes about his experience making money (or not) developing an iMessage app. Cutting to the chase:

As you can see the iMessage App Store was very promising at the beginning but nowadays it is somehow abandoned. This led me to release the app as an iOS app with an iMessage extension, and it is much more successful than just the iMessage app.

Interesting read. Not easy to make a living as an indie app developer.

My 2 cents: Articles like this are good input for folks just getting started, trying to sort out the best direction to take.

Yesterday, we posted a few links to articles on taking screenshots on your Mac and, more specifically, how to eliminate the drop shadow when you take a screen grab of a window.

This morning, Kirk McElhearn wrote a complementary piece showing how to change where your screenshots are saved. Me, I like saving them on my desktop, the easier to drag them into my Twitter client.

Not exactly sure where I’d ever use these, but I love design exploration and definitely enjoyed playing with this. I could see this as an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.

I do think the explore tab is a step in the right direction, though what’s missing is the ability to customize it or, tipping the cap to AI, for Twitter to learn the areas that interest you.

As is, there’s a top 20 “Trending Now” list and a seemingly structureless “Today’s Moments” list. To me, these could easily be blended together into a single interface, perhaps with the ability to favorite things you like, and reorder the list by hottest trending topics, chronologically, or by preference.

I love Twitter, both for communicating with the folks I follow and who follow me, and for keeping up to date on the larger Twitterverse. So much potential. And such a valuable resource, if we can get it right.