We’ve added a bunch of amazing new features to help improve your productivity, and made it possible to use Daylite with our Cloud service! Now you have the option to use Daylite Cloud, giving you all the benefits of a native Mac app, with the convenience of the Cloud. Or you can use Daylite 6 as a “Self-Serve” customer and manage Daylite Server on one of your own computers. You decide which option is best for you. Either way, you can still take advantage of all the new features in Daylite 6.
There are a number of websites and apps out there that help you track sunset and sunrise times so that you can plan your shoots around specific golden hour lighting. SunsetWx is a new website that takes things to the next level: it can forecast the quality of the upcoming sunset in your area (in the United States).
Created by three Pennsylvania-based meteorologists, the sunrise and sunset models take into account things like humidity, pressure changes, and clouds at various levels in the atmosphere. Wispy, high-altitude clouds are indications of a “high quality” sunset/sunrise, while low and thick clouds lower the score.
Photographers will tell you that not all sunsets are created equal. This site might be a way to increase your chances of getting that great sunset shot.
Jim and Merlin talk about who the iPad Pro is for, their favorite cover songs, and the best apps for making music. Also, Jim gives an out-of-character recommendation.
To celebrate the holidays, Microsoft employees, who were selected from across the country, gathered together, meeting each other for the first time, at the new Microsoft 5th Ave Store to spread some holiday wishes. Joined by a local NYC children’s youth choir, they share a message of peace and harmony with their neighbor down the street.
I hope we’re not too cynical and jaded that we can’t just sit back, watch this video and accept its message this holiday season.
Randy Spydell asked, in essence, why the File menu has a Duplicate command instead of the traditional Save As command. Implicit in his question was “and is there any way to bring back Save As?”
The answer to that second question is yes, and I’ll explain how in a moment.
This is one of those wonderful little “hacks” that you either don’t care about or you’re sitting there right now, going through Adam’s steps to put Save As back where it rightfully belongs.
We’ve been considering our options for some time. Over the last year, as we’ve made great progress with Sketch, the customer experience on the Mac App Store hasn’t evolved like its iOS counterpart. We want to continue to be a responsive, approachable, and easily-reached company, and selling Sketch directly allows us to give you a better experience.
There are a number of reasons for Sketch leaving the Mac App Store—many of which in isolation wouldn’t cause us huge concern. However as with all gripes, when compounded they make it hard to justify staying.
Not the first and certainly not the last developer to make this decision. As detailed in this blog post, the Mac App Store simply doesn’t work for some developers. Personally, I avoid using it whenever possible.
If you love Formula One racing, or if you grew up with slot racers (toy cars with pegs on the bottom drive on tracks with slots for those pegs, all driven with crazy abandon using electric controllers), you’ll definitely love this:
Imagine taking Google’s driverless car, mashing it up with Tesla’s zero-to-60-in-three-seconds “ludicrous mode,” and then pushing it to speeds of over 100 mph. Now imagine nearly two dozen of these souped-up robotic cars all speeding around on the same closed track and trying to outdo one another — without a human behind the wheel.
That’s basically what we’ll get next year in the Roborace, a high-speed stress test for 10 teams of driverless car designers who will compete as a part of Formula E, the global auto racing series that uses only electric cars.
John Voorhees, author of Blink, writing for MacStories:
One of the keys to succeeding in any online market where supply outstrips demand, or where risk is concentrated, is to remain nimble and distribute the risk. People have experimented with all sorts of revenue models as a hedge against this uncertainty. Memberships and patronage systems are options that let “super fans” support work that they value more than others. But, there’s another option you should consider that has a lower barrier to entry, the potential to reach a far wider audience, and once set up, works on autopilot, producing cash without any intervention by you and at no added cost to your audience – the iTunes Affiliate Program.
Outside of a savvy core of people who recognize that the affiliate program helps them keep doing what they love, the program is still largely unknown. The purpose of this article is to fix that – to lay it all out comprehensively.
Few people outside of Apple know as much about the iTunes Affiliate Program as John Vorhees. This is an expert guide.
Try asking Siri this (but substitute in your business of choice):
How late is Harris Teeter open?
This works well, though Siri can’t find the hours for some smaller businesses. I suspect this happens when the business does not have a web presence for Siri’s team to scrape.
Note that in the case above (Harris Teeter is open 24/7), Siri replies:
Harris Teeter is open all day today.
Good to know. Read the linked article for more details.
Customers who have a grandfathered unlimited smartphone data plan will receive notifications of a $5/mo. rate increase for the data plan. The rate increase will take effect starting with the customer’s February, 2016 service.
This price increase will not impact your current unlimited data speeds. You’ll still be able to enjoy the nation’s most reliable network and will only see reduced speeds if you exceed 22GB of data in a billing cycle and are in a congested area.
Should you decide to cancel your wireless service because of the $5/mo. increase, we will waive the early termination fees (ETFs) for the lines impacted by the price increase, so long as you cancel within 60 days after the price increase first appears on your bill. If you cancel after that time, you will be subject to the usual ETF.
First increase in 7 years. If the $5/month increase is a deal breaker, they’ll drop the early termination fee.
For nearly two decades, Flash Professional has been the standard for producing rich animations on the web. Because of the emergence of HTML5 and demand for animations that leverage web standards, we completely rewrote the tool over the past few years to incorporate native HTML5 Canvas and WebGL support. To more accurately represent its position as the premier animation tool for the web and beyond, Flash Professional will be renamed Adobe Animate CC, starting with the next release in early 2016.
Interesting move on Adobe’s part. They’re essentially giving up on the Flash brand while, at the same time, embracing HTML5 and WebGL. Hard for a brand to overcome so much negative baggage.
In 1992, Mike Myers used “Bohemian Rhapsody” as the rambunctious centerpiece of the indelible opening scene of the film, Wayne’s World, which had been adapted from a Saturday Night Live sketch of the same name, and gave the song and the band behind it an unprecedented second life.
The gleeful scene has become iconic itself, a cultural touchstone that’s been parodied, copied and celebrated almost since the moment of its release back in 1992. Here, the creative forces behind the scene and the beneficiaries of its influence tell the story of how all that happened and how it almost didn’t.
There are few movie scenes more full of childlike joy. I defy you to watch the attached video and not smile and sing along with Wayne and Garth.
Over the Thanksgiving break the intrepid crew over at Chipworks sent over their initial teardown information for Apple’s A9X SoC. The heart of the recently launched iPad Pro, the A9X is the latest iteration in Apple’s line of tablet-focused SoCs. We took an initial look at A9X last month, but at the time we only had limited information based on what our software tools could tell us. The other half of the picture (and in a literal sense, the entire picture) is looking at the physical layout of the chip, and now thanks to Chipworks we have that in hand and can confirm and reject some of our earlier theories.
I only understood about every fourth word in this article but it sounds like Apple has done some pretty incredible engineering.
Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook will collect a humanitarian award from an organization founded in honor of one of his personal heroes, Robert F. Kennedy.
The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights will present Cook with its Ripple of Hope Award on Dec. 8 in acknowledgment of his work on behalf of social change. He will be recognized in New York City, alongside U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and Freedom Rider during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s; Evercore co-founder and former assistant treasury secretary Roger Altman; and UNESCO Ambassador Marianna Vardinoyannis.
The Apple executive has become an outspoken advocate for workplace equality, arguing that businesses benefit when their workers feel fully recognized.
Congratulations to Mr Cook. Even though he gets a great deal of flack for it, I admire him for taking a stand on these issues.
Universal Pictures has released the script for the Aaron Sorkin Steve Jobs movie as a PDF. I love reading movie scripts of films I’ve seen but I’m unlikely to read this one because I’m not very interested in seeing the movie. Thanks to John Watson for pointing me to the web page.
What if you could get 5% of your day back? What would you do?
You already have enough work to do today and shouldn’t have to waste time looking for the things you need to do your job.
Igloo makes it easy to find what you need, when you need it. And it’s not just for locating your traditional intranet stuff like HR policies and expense forms. It also helps you find experts, talk about problems and share content with your team. So stop digging through your inbox for that file from 3 months back and give yourself the tools you need to do your best work.
Try it yourself or send your IT guy to investigate Igloo, an intranet you’ll actually like.
Because Apple makes the hardware, the operating system, and many applications, the Mac is a truly integrated system. And only the AppleCare Protection Plan gives you one-stop service and support from Apple experts, so most issues can be resolved in a single call. Extend the complimentary service and support on your Mac to three years from the original Mac purchase date with the AppleCare Protection Plan. You get direct telephone access to Apple experts for technical questions, and you get global repair coverage—including both parts and labor—for your Mac and select Apple peripherals.
Thanks to Dan Frakes on Twitter for this link. When I first saw it, I asked Dan if it was legit (knowing it was. Dan is the Senior Editor at Wirecutter and was formerly the same at Macworld magazine) and I trust him. There are some really good deals here – up to $100 off some AppleCare plans. I asked Dan for further info and he said, “I’ve purchased two AppleCare policies from them. You get a box with a code; you redeem the code on the AppleCare site.”
The user count is actually a link to a detailed demographic page. Click on the link and check out the second chart on the page that appears. You’ll see a breakdown showing rankings broken down by age range/gender. Find your demographic in the chart and you’ll get a sense of what people of your age/gender thought of the movie. Sometimes, those opinions vary wildly.
Personally, I find having this information makes IMDb much more useful.
If you’ve been using OS X El Capitan for a while, you might have noticed that the old option to “Secure Empty Trash” is gone from the trash can’s right-click menu. There’s a pretty good reason why, but it’s still possible to do it you don’t mind digging into the command line.
As the name suggests, “Secure Empty Trash” was always a way to delete files securely, ensuring they can’t get dug up again by data recovery software. According to Apple, it turns out that “Secure Empty Trash” doesn’t reliably work on flash storage, like an Solid-State Drive, so Apple removed the option in El Capitan.
Interesting. If Secure Empty Trash matters to you, follow the headline link to read more. There’s a Terminal command that’ll do the trick for a spinning hard disk, and a suggestion for folks with SSDs.
Some good stuff here, though I think the idea of paying $60 for a piece of cardboard (DODOcase VR Viewer) is a bit excessive.
I do think a VR viewer is a great gift idea, but there are plenty of much cheaper alternatives. If you click on the Amazon link, scroll down a bit to the “Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed” section and scroll through some of those.
Allen Pike builds iOS apps. He found his support in-box getting filled with support requests from another app, one he’d never even heard of.
Turns out, this is my problem. One email a month turned into one a week, then one a day, then multiple every day. Soon I was spending more time dealing with support for Music Player & Playlist Playtube manager than I was for our actual apps. Particularly frustrating was the fact that many of the emails described problems that could plausibly occur in our apps. It was time to dig deeper.
Turns out, there’s a flaw in the ecosystem:
Unfortunately, one does not simply contact Apple about an app. The official way to complain about an app is via the “Report a Problem” link from when you buy the app.
But what do you do if another developer is pointing their app at your tech support? Do you have to buy the offending app just to get this fixed?
Consider the world’s two largest car companies, Toyota and Volkswagen, both of which hover around $200B in revenue. Toyota just reported a higher than usual 10% net profit versus Apple’s 22.8%. The Financial Times recently pegged the VW brand’s Operating Margin at about 2%. (We’ll see how the German auto giant, which was ever so close to taking the industry’s Ichiban ranking from Toyota, extracts itself from its current engine management software troubles.)
Yes, the car industry is large (around $2T, that’s two thousand billions), but it grows slowly. In 2015 it saw 2% annual growth — and that was considered a good year.
The question isn’t how Apple could make money with cars but: Why should it bother?
Jean-Louis goes on to answer his own question, walking through some history (the iPod emerged from a similarly over-commoditized, saturated market), then exploring some of the factors that govern the existing car universe.
So much room for improvement/expansion, and right in Apple’s sweet spot. Great read.
Apple is planning to remove the 3.5mm headphone jack on the next-generation iPhone in favor of an all-in-one Lightning connector, according to often-reliable Japanese website Mac Otakara. Apple may also release Lightning-equipped EarPods to support the new audio output on future iOS devices.
The report, citing a “reliable source,” claims the new same-sized Lightning connector will support Lightning-equipped and Bluetooth headphones, and have a DAC, or digital-to-audio converter, for backwards compatibility with wired headphones using standard 3.5mm stereo jacks. A 3.5mm to Lightning adapter would be required.
This will cause some waves, as does any change from one connector type to another. Will this enable ear buds with better sound? Will the move from the standard 3.5mm plug to a lightning connector allow for headphones with more sophisticated control modules?
Clearly, there is a trend for manufacturers (Apple included) to reduce the number of ports on a device (e.g., the USB-C port on the latest MacBook), push all signals through a single port, if at all possible.
Dan Bostonweeks used the Amazon Instant Video iOS app to ask Amazon when Instant Video would be available for Apple TV. He tweeted their response:
Dan, I have interacted with our technical team and have been informed that they are currently working in developing a new app for the Apple TV. As we have already succeeded in developing an app for iPhone and iPad, we hope to make an app separately for the Apple TV. Hopefully, within a few weeks span, you will be able to see the Amazon Instant Video app feature on your Apple TV.
First things first, adding Instant Video support for Apple TV is a no-brainer move for Amazon. But it is a jarring, dissonant move. If you go to Amazon.com and search for Apple TV, you won’t find one for sale. Amazon clearly views Apple TV as the enemy.
But just as Apple has its ecosystem, Amazon has Prime at the center of things. Prime above all else. Things that add value to Prime make it more likely that customers will sign up for it.
Amazon Instant Video is part of the Prime ecosystem. Adding Instant Video to Apple TV is good for Instant Video, helps build that brand. And that, in turn, is good for Prime.
Taking Apple TV off the Amazon store shelves is a turn in the opposite direction, fighting against the Instant Video brand. Amazon needs to figure out where their bread is buttered and get their Instant Video ducks in a row.
Apple TV is not their enemy. Just like the Kindle App on iPads helps sell millions of eBooks, the Instant Video app on Apple TV will help build the Instant Video brand, which will help strengthen Prime.
While Pixar Animation is nearly 30 years old, it’s only been 20 years since the company ventured into feature length, computer animated filmmaking with Toy Story. The film was an instant classic in 1996 and it spawned two successful, acclaimed sequels with a fourth installment on the way in 2017, and it was just the beginning of what the animation house had to offer.
In celebration of Pixar’s milestone anniversary this year, editor Kees van Dijkhuizen has paid tribute to Pixar with a supercut of the films they’ve made over the years, from their early shorts to this year’s feature films. You might find yourself getting some tears in your eyes since it’s accompanied by Michael Giacchino‘s score from Up.
I don’t know if I could name a single studio that has moved me to the range of emotions Pixar has over the past 20 years.
