Apple is serious about Swift. This consumer facing page appeared on Apple’s site yesterday. The Swift push has begun. [via iOS Dev Weekly]

Ready to upgrade to Yosemite? First thing to do is make sure your hardware will support the upgrade. From Apple’s upgrade page, here are the eligible models:

• iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
• MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
• Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
• Xserve (Early 2009)

You’ll need to be running Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.8) or later.

Worth spending a few minutes on the upgrade page. Apple does a good job walking through the requirements for various Yosemite features, such as Handoff, Instant Hotspot, and making phone calls from your Mac.

Rolling Stone:

Though it’s been off the air for more than 20 years, The Wonder Years is one of those shows whose legacy has remained untarnished; you don’t hear many people looking back and saying it doesn’t hold up.

Set against the backdrop of the tumultuous late Sixties, the ABC show focused on a suburban family — in particular, the growing pains of youngest son Kevin, played by Fred Savage. It may be the story’s universality that’s accounted for its ability to stand the test of time, or simply that, because the show only ran for six seasons and faded away before it burned out, the series retained a level of consistent quality throughout.

I haven’t watched it since it was originally on but I remember it with great fondness.

Quartz:

Perhaps the most interesting news about Apple’s new iPad Air 2 tablet is buried at the bottom of one of its marketing pages: It will come pre-installed with a new “Apple SIM” card instead of one from a specific mobile operator.

It’s early, but it’s easy to see how this concept could significantly disrupt the mobile industry if Apple brings it to the iPhone.

That small announcement could be the shot heard round the telecom world.

“People love Mac mini. It’s a great first Mac or addition to your home network, and the new Mac mini is a nice upgrade packed into an incredibly compact design,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.

I think Phil summed it up perfectly—People love the Mac mini. Even though this wasn’t a staggering update, consumers are going to love it.

iMac with Retina 5K display delivers an amazingly immersive user experience. With a resolution of 5120 x 2880, iMac with Retina 5K display has four times more pixels than the standard 27-inch iMac and 67 percent more pixels than a 4K display. Text looks as sharp as it does on a printed page, and you can see more of your high-resolution photos with pixel-for-pixel detail.

I just saw the new iMac in the hands-on area after the event and it is incredible.

Apple today announced that OS X Yosemite, the latest major release of the world’s most advanced desktop operating system, is available as a free upgrade for Mac users from the Mac App Store.

I’ve been using Yosemite for a while now and I really like all of the changes, especially the redesigned interface.

Apple today announced that customers can start making payments with the touch of a finger on Monday, October 20, when Apple Pay becomes available in the US.

This could very well be one of Apple’s most significant announcements in years.

Apple today introduced iPad Air 2, the thinnest and most powerful iPad ever. Now just 6.1 mm thin and weighing less than a pound, iPad Air 2 features an improved Retina display for enhanced contrast and richer, more vibrant colors, and better cameras for taking stunning photos and videos. Available in gold, silver and space gray, the new iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3 offer Touch ID so users can unlock their iPad with just the touch of a finger and make purchases easily and securely within apps using Apple Pay.

Great looking devices.

This sound like the premise of a bar trick, but not so.

Why? Because data stored on flash drives has weight. The difference is almost infinitesimally minute, but it is there. The extra weight comes from flash storage storing more data in memory. The transistors in flash memory distinguish between a 1 and a 0 by trapping electrons.

Really love this science. And it was done by this guy, so you know it must be right. This comes from a 2011 New York Times blog post and the example used was a Kindle, but the concept is the same for any memory-based device.

Maurits Martijn, writing for Medium:

In his backpack, Wouter Slotboom, 34, carries around a small black device, slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes, with an antenna on it…Wouter removes his laptop from his backpack, puts the black device on the table, and hides it under a menu. A waitress passes by and we ask for two coffees and the password for the WiFi network. Meanwhile, Wouter switches on his laptop and device, launches some programs, and soon the screen starts to fill with green text lines. It gradually becomes clear that Wouter’s device is connecting to the laptops, smartphones, and tablets of cafe visitors.

On his screen, phrases like “iPhone Joris” and “Simone’s MacBook” start to appear. The device’s antenna is intercepting the signals that are being sent from the laptops, smartphones, and tablets around us.

Part of this is an education problem, teaching people how to be careful. But it’s foolish to think that any public WiFi connection is safe. It’s just far too easy to spoof trusted networks.

More text starts to appear on the screen. We are able to see which WiFi networks the devices were previously connected to. Sometimes the names of the networks are composed of mostly numbers and random letters, making it hard to trace them to a definite location, but more often than not, these WiFi networks give away the place they belong to.

We learn that Joris had previously visited McDonald’s, probably spent his vacation in Spain (lots of Spanish-language network names), and had been kart-racing (he had connected to a network belonging to a well-known local kart-racing center). Martin, another café visitor, had been logged on to the network of Heathrow airport and the American airline Southwest. In Amsterdam, he’s probably staying at the White Tulip Hostel. He had also paid a visit to a coffee shop called The Bulldog.

Recently, Starbucks changed the process by which you access their network. Now, with their Google partnership in place, you must log in to your Google account to access Starbuck’s Google wireless. This means sending out your Google credentials in a public space.

It’s one thing to provide a free WiFi connection, but another to require you to submit important trusted credentials over the public airwaves in order to get in. There are any number of ways for this to go wrong, including Wouter Slotboom’s black box spoofing a Google wireless hot spot, ready to harvest.

I love event days.

It’s kind of sad that Apple is the source of the leak.

Lots of changes in the latest update:

• Support for OS X Yosemite, including a Notification Center widget for quick calculations simply click on the display to switch to the main app, even mid-calculation.

• Handoff support, between PCalc running on iOS 8 and Yosemite – continue your calculation on any device. The full state of the calculator, including the tape, is sent over.

• Support for custom button layouts created with the iOS version. Full editing on the Mac will come in the next release.

• Visual improvements, to match the new look of Yosemite, and unify with the iOS release.

• A new dark calculator theme, “Backlight”.

• All the core calculation code improvements from PCalc 3.3.2 on iOS, including better operator precedence support.

8 Elite Mac Apps + 25 Comprehensive OS X & Web Development Courses

There are some nice apps here for $30.

TidBITS:

Hundreds of millions of customers use Apple products. I don’t know what the iCloud numbers are, but we are talking about a company that just sold 10 million iPhones in a weekend. Security complexity increases exponentially as fringe situations encompass millions of users. With Apple operating on that scale, the rules change.

Apple thus faces one of the most complex security challenges in society, and faces it at a scale only a handful of companies need to consider.

Users want security but few are willing to be inconvenienced by it. That puts Apple and other companies between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

This will impact a lot of companies, Google being a bit of a poster child here.

The government is phasing out what is known as the “double Irish” provision. It allows corporations with operations in Ireland to make royalty payments for intellectual property to a separate Irish-registered subsidiary. That subsidiary, though incorporated in Ireland, typically has its home in a country that has no corporate income tax.

Take Google. Its Dublin headquarters are its main hub outside the United States, employing more than 2,500 people. A Dublin-based subsidiary for Google generates revenue, mostly from online advertising, and then pays it in royalties to a separate Google unit that is registered in Ireland but is resident in Bermuda for tax purposes.

It’s important to note that the elimination of the “double Irish” provision will not, by itself, change the tax rates negotiated by companies like Apple. That’s a separate issue.

Mike Wehner of TUAW took the Moto 360 for a spin. The upshot is this:

My experience over the past week has taught me a lot about the future of smartwatches, the importance of intuitive software on a tiny device, and all the ways Apple could make just about every other smartwatch — including my new Moto 360 — look like a joke.

At the heart of the problem is the fact that the phone, the watch and the software that drive the Moto 360 are made by 3 different companies.

It starts with the software. Syncing the Moto 360 to Android Wear on my smartphone was needlessly complicated. At one point I was told via pop-up notification to uninstall Android Wear, update Google Search, then reinstall Android Wear, in order to get it to work properly. My phone was telling me I had to delete software that was built specifically for it, in order to get it to function as intended. I have to admit that I laughed.

This workflow fragmentation is never going to be solved completely. This is a huge advantage for Apple.

The all new Apogee Ensemble is the first Thunderbolt 2 audio interface to offer superior sound quality, the lowest latency performance and the most comprehensive studio functionality all in one box. Ensemble includes 8 Advanced Stepped Gain™ mic preamps, monitor controller functionality including talkback, front panel Guitar I/O, two headphone outputs and digital connectivity for a total of 30 x 34 I/O. Blending acclaimed innovations, groundbreaking new features and an effortless user interface, Ensemble empowers you to capture inspiration when creative lightning strikes.

What a great looking interface. This thing is a beast.

John Kirk for Tech.pinions:

Samsung has reported a 60% fall in quarterly profits. Just three years ago, Samsung rose from seemingly nowhere to dominate the global smartphone market. Today, Samsung is being pressured from above and below as Apple steals away its premium customers and Xiomi and others steal away customers from the low-end.

Why did Samsung fail? In a word, commoditization.

Pundits have predicted, correctly, that hardware would inevitably become commoditized. This, they proclaimed with confidence, would cause Apple’s prices to fall while Samsung, with its good-enough and better-than-good-enough hardware and its lower prices, would usurp Apple’s market share, relegating Apple to niche status. Ironically, commoditization DOES apply to Samsung — the favorite of the Priests of Market Share — but it DOES NOT apply to their favorite whipping boy, Apple. Why? Differentiation.

Read the whole thing. I love the way this pulls everything together.

In the US, there are any number of situations where you hand someone your credit card and it disappears from view. A drive through at McDonald’s is a perfect example. You drive up to the pay window, hand the cashier your card, it disappears from view, then comes back to you with a receipt. If you go to a higher end restaurant, you’ll get the check, lay your credit card on top, and watch your card disappear to be processed.

Apple Pay is changing that game. Now, when you roll up to the drive through, the cashier will hand you the portable NFC reader, you’ll tap your phone or Apple Watch, hear the confirmation beep, then hand it back. No credit card, no signing, no pin code.

Voracious reader? If so, this may change things for you.

Most libraries (at least in the United States) use Overdrive as their ebook library solution. From what I can tell it’s usually tied into a library network like the Minuteman Library Network. Your library will own ebooks. However, unlike the Amazon Prime Lending Library (we’ll be visiting Amazon again by the time we’re done), people can only check out as many copies of an ebook as your library owns. So, if your library only has one electronic copy of the new John Sandford book, only one person can check out the book at a time. What is nice, though, is you can place a hold on a title and it will automatically be checked out to you when it’s available.

I will be trying this, just as soon as I finish the 17 books in my queue.