Juli Clover, writing for Mac Rumors:

In iOS 10, there’s a new Face Gallery in the Watch app, which is designed to let users customize their Apple Watch faces in watchOS 3 right from their iPhones. Tweaking an Apple Watch face from an awkward angle on a wrist and on a tiny screen can be a hassle, making the Face Gallery a welcome addition to the Watch app.

This is a great idea. Watch the video below to get a sense of how this works.

From the patent:

For example, an infrared emitter can be located in areas where picture or video capture is prohibited, and the emitter can generate infrared signals with encoded data that includes commands to disable the recording functions of devices. An electronic device can then receive the infrared signals, decode the data and temporarily disable the device’s recording function based on the command.

In other words, a jammer to prevent picture taking or video recording. I can’t imagine that this invention will ever find its way into a product. If it does, what’s to prevent someone from placing a nuisance jammer in a concert venue, or police from regularly carrying one to prevent unauthorized filming of an arrest?

South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating “some matters” relating to tech giant Apple…

Couldn’t be any more vague.

I like what Apple is doing with Shot on iPhone. If nothing else it reminds us that we all have a great camera in our hands most of the day.

Iceland deserves so much credit for their wins in this year’s tournament, but England played so badly. I cheer for them in the World Cup and Euro every time and they never fail to disappoint.

China has tightened rules for mobile app developers including requiring real-name registration and preserving users’ activity logs, the country’s internet regulator said on Tuesday, as Beijing looks to strengthen oversight of the growing app market.

Part of China’s reasoning is to crack down on “unscrupulous” use of its platforms to “spread malicious rumors.”

Alphabet’s Google may face a third EU antitrust charge as soon as next month, this time focusing on its revenue mainstay AdWords ad placement service, three people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

This reminds me of Microsoft’s antitrust troubles back in the day.

Fantastic moment. Watch the video below. I’d love a captioned version so I could follow along, but you’ll get the basics even if you don’t speak French.

From the 9to5Mac article:

The incident was reported by Pure Médias, which says that power was lost for three hours. Emergency lighting kicked in, but the TV cameras were still not able to function, so the decision was made to continue recording using iPhones.

This is reportedly the first time a broadcast TV show has ever been shot on iPhone in the country, though we have of course seen ads, documentaries and even movies shot entirely with iPhones – as well as Apple showing what amateurs can do with the iPhone through its Shot on iPhone campaign.

And from the original French article, translated via Google Translate:

Electricity has finally returned after several hours but not enough to restart all engines, lights and technical equipment necessary for the proper filming of the show. Laurent Ruquier therefore continued interviews filmed … the iPhone to its employees, as seen on this shared image by Nathalie André France 2 on Facebook. The question is whether these videos will be usable for broadcast Saturday night on France 2. Farewell Leah Salame promise to be memorable, they were recorded with a smartphone held by Laurent Ruquier!

And here’s the video.

Buzzfeed:

Twitter is built on a follow model, which is great for some use cases, but also means you’re going to miss a lot of great stuff from people you don’t follow. Unless you followed certain Democratic lawmakers, you likely missed lots of action from the House floor during the sit-in this week. But there’s a solution to that: A Twitter that temporarily inserts relevant tweets from the right people at the right moment into your timeline would be a much more useful Twitter. Amazingly, this Twitter already exists but is buried puzzlingly deep within the platform’s user interface.

This is, indeed, an obscure feature. It’s buried in the Moments tab and not presented consistently. I think Moments has potential, but it is not tunable in any meaningful way, which makes it pretty much useless for me. Twitter, how about exposing some settings here so I can pick events I want to follow, turn them on and off, somehow customize the way Moments is folded into my main stream. As is, Moments is only exposed if you go to it and (as far as I know) only in the main Twitter app.

Terrific walkthrough of the newly updated Remote app that lets you use your iPhone to control your Apple TV.

On the down side, you won’t be able to control your TV’s volume using the app (UPDATE: The Apple TV remote controls TV volume using IR, which the iPhone does not have)

On the up side, you’ll have a much larger screen space, more precise control of playing content, and a much better keyboard for typing in passwords and the like.

Watch the video to see all this in action.

This well designed flat card slides out of your wallet and quickly unfolds into a stand for your phone, perfect for in flight entertainment. Originally released as part of a 2013 Kickstarter, this new version is updated to accommodate iPhones in cases as well as Android phones.

Great idea.

[CAUTION: On the Mac, the headline link takes you to a page with AutoPlay. Macworld, we love you, but this is a terrible interface. When the page loads, a video starts playing, a video that has nothing to do with the article I came to read. And once it gets going, the video is both hard to find and hard to stop. Bridge burning behavior.]

Above caveat aside, this is a solid article that shows off the use of tabs in macOS Sierra, tabs that you’ve long used in Safari and, likely less often, in the Finder.

One of the best things about Sierra tabs is that developers get them for free, so you’ll be able to use tabs in all your favorite apps.

Daniel Dilger, writing for Apple Insider:

In 2014, Apple introduced App Extensions, a new architecture for building app components that could be distributed with an app, and designed specifically to add insert new functionality into core OS features on both iOS and macOS.

The following year, Apple introduced Content Blockers as a new class of App Extensions specially targeting Safari, supporting the ability to prevent the downloading of any defined content, including display ads, images, navigation elements, popups, scripts, fonts, style sheets, media files, cookies, or essentially anything on a web page.

On both macOS Sierra 10.12 and today’s El Capitan 10.11.5 (when Safari 10 is installed), Safari will support App Extensions built from a combination of JavaScript, CSS and native code written in Objective-C or Swift.

And:

More importantly, the new App Extensions architecture enables developers to distribute Safari Extensions as part of their app through the App Store.

This opens a brave new world for developers, who can now build Safari extensions, custom designed to extend their app’s reach through the browser, distributing app and extension side-by-side in the Mac App Store.

Seattle Times:

A few days after Microsoft released Windows 10 to the public last year, Teri Goldstein’s computer started trying to download and install the new operating system.

The update, which she says she didn’t authorize, failed. Instead, the computer she uses to run her Sausalito, Calif., travel-agency business slowed to a crawl. It would crash, she says, and be unusable for days at a time.

“I had never heard of Windows 10,” Goldstein said. “Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to update.”

And:

When outreach to Microsoft’s customer support didn’t fix the issue, Goldstein took the software giant to court, seeking compensation for lost wages and the cost of a new computer.

She won. Last month, Microsoft dropped an appeal and Goldstein collected a $10,000 judgment from the company.

Terrible strategy. And now there’s a precedent for a potential wave of lawsuits.

This will be a very interesting quarter for Apple. They gave guidance in the last quarter, so their shouldn’t be any big surprises, but I’m interested to hear what Tim Cook has to say about services, iPhone, and India.

Airbnb sued the city of San Francisco on Monday, arguing that a recent ordinance which requires hosts to register with the city violates the online home-sharing company’s free speech rights.

It’s all about taxes.

I’ve been using Field Notes notebooks for many years, but these new ones are really nice. They’re called the Byline Edition. I must have them.

Starting today, iOS users in 10 US cities will see the option for Featured Events in a carousel atop their list of upcoming soirees. Facebook’s curators will cull through each city’s top art, entertainment, family, festival, fitness, food & drink, learning, community, music, and sports events, and select a few with the capacity to accept some extra foot traffic.

I like it. And the idea of having a single letter secondary logo provides them with a lot of options, especially if they can make it synonymous with their company.

WANT!

[Via Coudal]

Soon, you can browse our rotating sets of stickers to join in on real-time conversations, and select from the library of hundreds of accessories, emoji, and props to make your photos more fun.

Get ready, these will be everywhere.

Serenity Caldwell takes you on a tour through Apple’s upcoming Apple Watch OS update. Of note:

Apple’s 2016 software updates are currently available only as closed developer previews. While the betas contain new features, they also contain pre-release bugs that can prevent the normal use of your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, or Mac, and are not intended for everyday use on a primary device. That’s why we strongly recommend you stay away, at least until the public iOS and macOS betas in July, if not the general releases this fall.

I depend on my Apple Watch too much to make the update and will follow this advice.

That said, take a read through the article to get a sense of the big changes.

Apple gave a terrific one-of-a-kind gift to employees who participated in Sunday’s annual San Francisco LGBT Pride parade.

I love that Apple supports this. A nice looking band.

Michael Cohen, writing for TidBITS:

Among the tidbits Apple revealed to its developer audience at the recently completed Worldwide Developers Conference was a new file system for the whole range of its products. Dubbed “APFS” (an acronym that Apple doesn’t completely spell out even in its developer documentation), the file system is meant to replace HFS+, the file system that in turn replaced 1985’s HFS (Hierarchical File System) in 1998. (HFS+ has received numerous updates since 1998, so don’t get the impression that it’s completely obsolete.) A developer preview of APFS is baked into the forthcoming macOS Sierra and Apple says APFS will become the default file system in all of its operating systems — macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS — by late 2017.

Nice high level walkthrough of a major unifying change coming to your favorite operating system.

As to the acronym APFS, the sense I get from an informal Twitter poll is that APFS stands for Apple File System. And, as Kirk McElhearn points out here, Apple uses the acronym APFS and the name Apple File System consistently, as if the acronym came from APple File System and not Apple Pxxx File System.

Jonny Evans digs into the process of using Siri on your Sierra-installed Mac, including preferences and lots and lots of examples.

A short, but nice overview from MacRumors on tvOS 10. I’m really looking forward to this OS release.

It’s a crazy day.

As for what data is being collected, Apple says that differential privacy will initially be limited to four specific use cases: New words that users add to their local dictionaries, emojis typed by the user (so that Apple can suggest emoji replacements), deep links used inside apps (provided they are marked for public indexing) and lookup hints within notes.

I’m completely fine with this. Apple is trying to walk a very thin line between not accessing user data and getting information to make its device and services more effective for users. As long as we know what’s going on, everything is good.