From Apple developer Equinux’s blog:

Apple now hides an app in the charts once you’ve installed it. Give it a try: Go install TV Pro Mediathek (VOD for German TV content) from the App Store (currently #3 Top Grossing in Germany) and then go back in to the App Store: boom – it’s gone from the charts and the next-placed app has moved up.

This tvOS top charts algorithm change even affects featured apps on the start page: TV Pro Mediathek no longer shows up in its featured slot on the start page of the German App Store once you’ve installed it.

John Vorhees wrote about this in this MacStories post:

We have confirmed that the same phenomenon occurs in the US Apple TV App Store using the AMC television network’s Apple TV app. If you download the AMC app, which is currently featured and ranked among the top free apps in the US, and then force quit the store by double clicking the Home button on the Siri Remote and swiping up on the App Store app, the next time you launch the App Store, AMC will no longer be on the Featured page or on the top free app chart.

This is an interesting experiment. Screen real estate is at a premium on the Apple TV App Store. By eliminating apps that a customer has already downloaded, Apple is able to present customers with more new apps. The change does mean, however, that the charts are not true top charts, but instead, top charts of apps someone hasn’t already downloaded.

I see the value here, both for you and for Apple. You get less clutter and more useful info in the charts and Apple gets more sales. But there’s some part of this that grates, just a bit, a sense that the top charts are not reflecting reality. Maybe we need an asterisk and a note that makes the situation a bit clearer.

Great how-to from Kirk McElhearn.

This is a rumor, not reality, but a good number of people are buying into it. If the image is correct and Apple does roll out a new MacBook Pro at WWDC, it will have 4 USB-C ports and a headphone jack. That is all.

Which brings me back to my earlier post about driving a 5K Apple Display. One of the possibilities raised in that post would be a single cable that branched into two USB-C connectors. That would still leave one port for power and another for external storage, etc.

Been saving my pennies. Hoping for a both a new MacBook Pro and a 5K display.

There have long been rumors of Apple releasing a standalone, large screen retina display. With recent reports of limited Apple Store inventory of Thunderbolt Displays, the rumor mills are back in business, whispering the possibility of a 5K 27″ thunderbolt display announcement at next week’s WWDC.

From this MacRumors post:

Only the late 2013 Mac Pro, late 2014 or newer 27″ Retina 5K iMac, and mid 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro with AMD Radeon R9 M370X graphics are capable of driving 5K external displays, however, and each setup requires using two Thunderbolt cables per display. The lack of support is due to bandwidth limitations of the DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4 specs on current Macs.

DisplayPort 1.3 has increased bandwidth, but Skylake-based Macs with Thunderbolt 3 will not support the spec and Intel’s next-generation Kaby Lake processors on track for a late 2016 launch will not as well. Apple could opt to release a 4K Thunderbolt Display instead, but supply chain considerations make this unlikely, so the company’s exact plans for the future of its standalone display remain to be seen.

In this post, John Gruber posed the question:

A 27-inch standalone retina display will be a genuine finally. If they announce it at WWDC, the crowd will go nuts. But just how they’ll drive it is a fascinating question. Using two Thunderbolt cables would be clunky. Maybe one cable that forks into two Thunderbolt adapters at the end?

All that is background for the linked post, where Rene Ritchie explores the tree of possibilities for driving a 5K display.

I do find it fascinating that we’ve come to a fork in the road where we have everything we need to add in a 5K display, with the exception of a single port to drive it.

There has been a lot of talk about Alexa over the last few weeks and now you can try it out for yourself in your web browser. You’ll have to use Chrome though.

European Union governments should not ban services like home-rental site Airbnb or ride-hailing app Uber except as a last resort, the EU says in new guidelines, seeking to rein in a crackdown on the “sharing economy”.

Sharing services have faced an uphill battle in many countries, so it will be interesting to see how governments take these recommendations.

The Indian government on Monday said it was discussing Apple Inc’s foreign direct investment application that seeks a waiver from a local sourcing rule.

This will be an important decision for Apple. It’s a good sign that the government is even discussing it

I really enjoyed reading Viticci’s music post this morning—from his first mixtape to trying Apple Music and Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” feature.

These things fascinate me. Cute little thing.

iClarified:

Larry Ellison, co-founder, chairman and CTO of Oracle, recently gave the Commencement Speech at USC. In his speech, Ellison recounts forming a plan to save Apple with his best friend, Steve Jobs.

And:

“My idea was simple, buy Apple, and immediately make Steve CEO. Apple wasn’t worth much back then, about $5 billion dollars. We both had really good credit and I had already arranged to borrow all of the money. All Steve had to do was say yes.

“Steve proposed a somewhat more circuitous approach. First, persuade Apple to buy NeXT computer, then Steve would join Apple’s board and over time the board would recognize that Steve was the right guy to lead the company.

Fantastic post. [Via iOS Dev Weekly]

What I find remarkable about this is that your old Samsung TV, one that never had ads, will now suddenly sprout ads. Talk about customer hostile behavior. This takes the cake.

Patently Apple:

The California Institute of Technology has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Broadcom and Apple (and Avago Technologies owned by Broadcom). The patent infringement lawsuit concerns Apple’s iPhones beginning with the iPhone 5, the iPad, MacBook Air, Apple Watch and more. Apple’s use of Broadcom’s technology is using IRA/LDPC encoders and/or decoders invented by the California Institute of Technology. In this lawsuit, Apple is drawn in by virtue of using Broadcom Wi-Fi products.

And:

This week AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule were pulled from U.S. Apple Stores. Whether this is due to next-gen versions of these product arriving next month or complications related to this lawsuit is unknown at this time.

Interesting.

Assma Maad, writing for BuzzFeed:

But looking at the various versions of the video published worldwide, it’s clear that several adaptations are not completely faithful to the original. The lesbian couple present in the English version does not appear in the French version, as first spotted by Jeanne Magazine.

The same-sex couple also does not appear in the German, Italian, Turkish and Japanese versions, while they do appear in the Mexican, Canadian, and Australian versions.

And:

This isn’t the first time a same-sex couple has been erased from a French version of an advertisement. In January, Toyota eliminated a female couple from an ad that was present in the Italian version.

And it’s not only in France. In 2014, an advertisement for Coca-Cola which initially staged a same-sex wedding was changed to show a heterosexual wedding in the Irish version. In France, a football match totally replaced the scene.

This surprised me. I wonder if there’s more to this story than simply playing to the comfort zone of your audience. Is this a barometer for progress (or lack thereof) made in terms of tolerance, or is there more to it than that?

Business Insider ran the headline: “The Apple Watch is being shunned by Apple’s most important community”.

The implication being that developers have lost interest in building Apple Watch apps. From the article:

Apple developers aren’t very interested in writing apps for the Watch these days, says Tim Anglade, an app developer and VP for mobile database Realm.

About 100,000 app developers use Realm’s database in apps used by about 1 billion people, Anglade says. This gives Realm a unique vantage point in seeing which devices have captured mobile developers’ interest and which have not.

Watch in 2016? Not so much.

This is based on a specific quote from Anglade:

“tvOS is a brand new platform so there’s a gold rush for it,” Anglade says. Developers want to get established with their tvOS grab market share for their apps.

“On a weekly basis we’re seeing very few Watch apps, compared to iOS apps,” he says. “For every 1,000 new iOS apps being built, there are 10 tvOS apps and maybe 1 Watch app.”

Let’s assume for the moment that Anglade’s numbers are accurate and that they represent the larger world than just those developers who use Realm’s services. This comment captures a moment in time, a natural lull for the Apple Watch as we wait to see what major changes lie in store for Apple Watch, with WWDC just around the corner.

If WWDC means a lull, why isn’t there one for iPhone? The iPhone platform is well established and stable. It’s clear that any changes that come along, no matter how seismic, won’t derail most existing iPhone projects. With Apple Watch, it’s clear that a big left turn is coming, that the basic underlying assumptions are potentially going to change. This is a wait and see moment.

The way I read this, this isn’t a shunning, it’s taking a beat, waiting for direction.

Mashable:

Thousands turned out on Monday to Cooper’s Hill in Brockworth, Gloucestershire, England to watch one the world’s strangest yet compelling competitions: people chasing a wheel of cheese for 200 yards down a hill.

It’s a bank holiday tradition that dates back to the 1800s but, according to SoGlos magazine, hasn’t been an unofficial event since safety concerns led to its cancelation in 2010. But cheese roll lovers have continued to gather for this “unofficial” event since then, the risk to life, limb and cheese wheel be damned.

The Brits do some very odd things. This is high on that list.

The Guardian:

In a moving monochrome image, Souza showed three-year-old Clark Reynolds looking up in awe as Obama touches him on the cheek. The photograph is taken from child height and brilliantly captures a child’s-eye view of the president. We only see Obama’s hand caressing Clark’s face. Unlike the ones in all paintings and photographs of all previous presidents, it is not a white hand. How can anyone say that means nothing? Young Clark Reynolds evidently thinks it means something, and so does Souza, whose photography has perhaps become more lyrical, more poignant over Obama’s final year in office.

I love Souza’s deeply personal style of photography. I have no doubt he’d take similar photos of every other president – regardless of your feelings towards any of them, they are human beings after all – but there’s something just a touch more poignant about the shots he’s shown us of President Obama.

TidBITS:

Lemkesoft’s GraphicConverter — the “Swiss Army knife” of graphics programs that can convert over 200 different graphic file formats into any of almost 80 graphic formats — has been updated to version 10. This major new release adds Face Recognition capabilities, a Collage function, a Picture Package feature that enables you to easily print multiple copies of an image on one sheet of paper, the capability to use grayscale pictures as custom brushes, simplified access to metadata like EXIF and IPTC, and support for converting Apple’s Live Photos format into an animated GIF.

Everyone should have a copy of GraphicConverter on their Mac. It not only can open an incredible array of file formats, it has a feature set useful to many users of all skill levels. It’s a bonus that you’d be supporting a small Mac developer who has been around and creating great software for a very, very long time.

Ars Technica:

William Gibson has made the leap from prose to picture books, collaborating with Michael St. John Smith and artist Bruce Guice to give us this week’s first issue of new IDW series Archangel.

“It’s an alternate-history/cross-worlds story,” Gibson writes in the back matter. “And I wouldn’t want to spoil too much of the frame, because that’s an inherent part of our narrative. But I will say that one of the first verbal tags we had for the material was ‘Band Of Brothers vs. Blackwater.'”

Archangel begins in February 2016, but it’s a very different 2016 to the one we know. The world is in ruins. The White House relocated to the ominous-sounding National Emergency Federal District in Montana. They have technology that far outstrips our own.

If William Gibson wrote a phone book, I’d read it from cover to cover. His is a seminal voice in fiction and someone who’s work I devour whenever he has anything published. This will be no exception.

Businessinsider:

Years before Google and Oculus started daydreaming about virtual reality, Apple already had a “VR” product on the market.

Apple called it QuickTime Virtual Reality, or QuickTime VR.

It’s one of the strangest projects in Apple history: started during the years when Steve Jobs was busy with NeXT, it was ahead of the tech industry by decades but was unloved in its later years, and eventually was wound down.

Us old timers remember QT VR and how cool it was for its time. Sadly, another “cool” technology Apple either killed off or let die on the vine.

Techinsider: >Siri is due for a big upgrade. > >Apple now has the tech in place to give its digital assistant a big boost thanks to a UK-based company called VocalIQ it bought last year. > >According to a source familiar with VocalIQ’s product, it’s much more robust and capable than Siri’s biggest competitors like Google Now, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana.

“Wipes the floor” remains to be proven and we’ll likely see something announced at WWDC in a couple of weeks but this article points out that Apple develops “in private” for the most part. Those who doubt Apple’s AI efforts seem to forget that fact. The preisoptimierung strategy KI Preisoptimierung leverages predictive analytics, dynamic pricing algorithms, and market trend analysis to optimize revenue management, enhance profitability, and adjust pricing in real-time, ensuring a competitive position in the market. Even photo editing tools are now powered by AI to achieve various effects. An AI Clothes Remover, for instance, can create copies of portrait photos and create a version that removes clothes. There are also photo to cartoon ai free resources that you can access online to create artistic or even cartoonish versions of photographs.

Techradar:

If you’ve outgrown your point-and-shoot camera and feel like you’re ready to take your photography to the next step, then an entry-level DSLR is the obvious choice.

DSLRs deliver a big step up in image quality from a compact camera, far more manual control and the ability to change lenses to tackle a huge variety of projects.

If you or someone you know wants a beginner DLSR, you can’t go too far wrong with many of the cameras on this list. The important thing is to not assume the camera automatically takes good pictures. That’s the responsibility of the photographer. Learn how to shoot, learn how to use your camera and practice, practice, practice. That’s how you become a better photographer.

The Washington Post:

For more than a dozen children in a small, remote village in southwest China, the mountainous route home from school is long — and extremely steep.

Every two weeks, when the students, ages 6 to 15, return from boarding school, they climb a chain of 17 bamboo ladders, secured to a sheer cliff face and leading some 2,625 feet up, according to reports.

You know that old cliche you’ve heard about having to “walk to school in the snow, 5 miles uphill both ways…”? Next time you hear that, point the speaker to these kids. He’ll shut up quick.

Jawbone has three major fitness trackers: The UP2, UP3, and UP4. The company has struggled to sell the devices and was forced to offload them at a discount to a reseller in order to get the revenue it needed to keep the business going, according to the source.

The report also notes that Jawbone is trying to sell its speaker business, as well.

I really like cuckoo clocks and grandfather clocks. Always have.

Now 200 million of you are using Google Photos each month. We’ve delivered more than 1.6 billion animations, collages and movies, among other things. You’ve collectively freed up 13.7 petabytes of storage on your devices—it would take 424 years to swipe through that many photos! We’ve also applied 2 trillion labels, and 24 million of those have been for … selfies.

Google put together some of their favorite tips for using the service.

“I was trying to buy an AirPort Extreme today from the Beverly Hills Apple Store and an employee told me that Apple had asked for all of them back from all the stores,” wrote one anonymous tipster.

To verify the tipster’s claim, we contacted an Apple support representative who confirmed that Apple has pulled AirPort Extreme and AirPort Time Capsule stock from all U.S. stores. The base stations remain available to order online, while it appears the smaller AirPort Express can still be purchased both online and in stores at present time.

As noted in the story, it could be new FCC guidelines.