Bare Bones Software, makers of BBEdit, is one of my favorite software companies — in fact, I’ve been using BBEdit for more than 20 years. BBEdit has been updated to version 13, and is available in the Mac App Store as a subscription! Same great features. Same user experience. You can subscribe in the Mac App Store or purchase perpetual licenses directly from Bare Bones Software. Also, you can still get great merch, including Classic and Rebus T-shirts, enamel pins, and more in their merch store!
Marc Levoy, the researcher who used software to turn Google’s Pixel camera into a powerhouse, has joined Adobe to build a universal camera app, Adobe announced today.
Levoy headed up the team that developed the impressive computational photography technology used in Google’s Pixel smartphones, including features like Night Sight, Portrait Mode, and HDR+.
My basic theory is that Google, institutionally, is bored with Android — and if Google has lost interest in Android generally it’s going to lose interest in Pixels specifically.
Not a big leap to the possibility that Marc Levoy was feeling a bit bored/limited with the future in Google’s computational photography efforts.
Google’s loss is Adobe’s gain. And, if a cool new camera app comes to iOS, Apple’s gain as well.
Apple is being sued for allegedly refusing to help those who have fallen victim to a iTunes gift card scam. An 11-count class action lawsuit has been filed against the company.
Apple is accused of lying when it says that there is no way to trace or refund the value of the cards.
Once you buy the card, the caller then will demand the gift card number and PIN on the back of the card. Those numbers let them immediately get the money you loaded onto the card. And once they’ve done that, the scammers and your money are gone, usually without a trace.
Is Apple responsible for scammers emptying a card of its value? That’s the question that this lawsuit will address. This has been going on long enough, you’d think someone would have come up with a more bulletproof scheme for gift cards.
Is resistance to a new design concern for lack of convenience? Is the day of the gift card coming to an end?
Apple’s VP, Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, and former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa P Jackson, on Medium:
Decades of research have shown that climate change and pollution disproportionately hurt poor communities and communities of color, deepening inequality in the U.S. and around the world.
And:
Since our carbon emissions peaked at 38.4 million metric tons in 2015, we’ve managed to reduce our carbon footprint by 35%. As of 2018, every Apple office, Retail store, and data center has run on 100% clean energy. And today, our facilities and corporate operations worldwide are carbon neutral.
And:
It’s in that spirit that we’re beginning a new chapter in our environmental journey, one that starts with a promise. By 2030, Apple will be 100% carbon neutral. Our comprehensive carbon footprint will net to zero. And we’re sharing a detailed plan for how we’ll get there — so that companies large and small can not only see why we’re doing this, but how we’re doing it.
To business leaders in every industry: the eyes of our children are on us. We can’t talk about equality without curbing pollution, or confine our climate efforts to corporate emissions when our real impacts stretch deep into the supply chain. We have a generational opportunity to help build a greener and more just economy, one where we develop whole new industries in the pursuit of giving the next generation a planet worth calling home.
When you consider Apple’s iPhone 12 and the potential for shipping a much smaller package, leaving out EarPods and charging bricks, keep Apple’s promise in the back of your mind.
Apple today unveiled its plan to become carbon neutral across its entire business, manufacturing supply chain, and product life cycle by 2030. The company is already carbon neutral today for its global corporate operations, and this new commitment means that by 2030, every Apple device sold will have net zero climate impact.
This is an incredibly ambitious announcement. And I have to believe that Apple would not put this out into the world if they didn’t have complete faith that they’d have the ability to be true to their word.
Apple posted these two videos over the weekend, both highlighting the artistic possibilities of the Mac.
The first shows off photographer Tyler Mitchell:
“What can I do with the sweaters I’ve worn on my back.” Tyler Mitchell takes us to his place in Bed-Stuy, as he works on a new portrait series using only elements from his own bedroom. Remote cameras were set up in the fashion photographer’s apartment, capturing his creative process as he shot and edited the series over a 24 hour period. Digging through references, compiling a mood board, capturing the images, scanning them into his MacBook, and editing the selects in Photoshop. Putting the final touches on the portraits just before midnight.
Fascinating to watch the process unfold, all taking place in an apartment with some amazing light, and right off the train tracks. I spent my youngest years living in Queens, right around the corner from the el. Those trains really struck a chord. Beautiful video.
And next up is musician James Blake, putting his MacBook and Logic Pro X through their paces:
“It feels like a dream that I’m sort of walking through and I’m able to affect what happens in it.” James Blake lets us inside his brain as he writes the new song “ASK FOR MORE.” Remote cameras were set up in the GRAMMY® Award winner’s home studio, capturing his entire creative process as he worked on writing, recording and editing the song over a 24 hour period. From time spent crafting a melody at his piano, to looping and pitching the melody and adding layers, instruments and vocals in Logic Pro X on his MacBook, to editing it into a finished song. Completing the track just after 1am.
Owners of Apple Card are reporting Apple is finally expanding the number of credit reference agencies it will report to, with claims the Apple-branded credit card is starting to appear on credit reports generated by Experian.
So far, Apple has limited its reporting of consumer balances to one credit bureau, TransUnion, while no reporting was being made to either Experian or Equifax. While this has been the case for months, it now seems that the reporting is being made to more agencies.
Have an Apple Card? Your credit behavior just got more exposure, with Goldman-Sachs being an extra creditor reporting to Experian.
See also, this Reddit thread of folks reporting Apple Card sightings on their Experian credit reports.
Before the rapid growth of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, a protocol called Gopher briefly made the internet easy to use by combining the world’s online resources. Here’s what made it special, and why it was quickly eclipsed by the web.
Gopher is a client/server directory system that launched in 1991. It allowed people to quickly browse resources on the internet. When you used a Gopher client, you would see a hierarchical menu of links that either led to documents, telnet-based applications, FTP sites, or other Gopher servers. You could also search across “Gopherspace” to find documents instead of hunting through FTP servers one by one.
Macs with Apple Silicon will largely be faster than existing notebooks. This isn’t too far-fetched, given Apple’s claims about the superior performance of the 2018 iPad Pro when it was announced. If the iPad Pro is faster than most PC laptops, wouldn’t it stand to reason that even the slowest of the new generation of Macs would be as fast or faster than the competition?
Let’s not forget how Apple’s pride factors in to this transition. If Apple releases a Mac that’s not any faster than the Intel-based competition, that reflects poorly on the prowess of Apple’s processor design. I firmly believe that Apple would never initiate a processor transition like this unless it was confident that its chips would end up looking like world-beaters.
How this plays out will be interesting but as Snell says, it’s a mortal lock they will be faster than their equivalent Intel counterparts.
The most important thing to understand about the role Arm processor architecture plays in any computing or communications market — smartphones, personal computers, servers, or otherwise — is this: Arm Holdings, Ltd. owns the design of its chips, and the architecture of their instruction sets, such as 64-bit Arm64. For its customers who build systems around these chips, Arm has done the hard part for them.
Apple Silicon is the phrase Apple presently uses to describe its own processor production, beginning last June with Apple’s announcement of the replacement of its x86 Mac processor line. In its place, in Mac laptop units that are reportedly already shipping, will be a new system-on-a-chip called A12Z, code-named “Bionic,” produced by Apple using the 64-bit instruction set licensed to it by Arm Holdings. Again, Arm is not the manufacturer but the designer of the processing cores and other on-chip parts. In this case, Arm isn’t the designer either, but the producer of the instruction set around which Apple makes its original design.
I don’t know if it’s everything you need to know but there is a lot of information here.
Do you remember your childhood phone number? How about saying your name backwards? Dave has all kinds of questions today. We also talk about Apple Music lyrics, Twitter hacking, and Apple News+ audio before Dave tells a wonderful story about iPhone and spending some time with his dad.
This starts with a retelling of the hack story, but that’s just the start. The real juice starts down below that.
People within the SIM swapping community are obsessed with hijacking so-called “OG” social media accounts. Short for “original gangster,” OG accounts typically are those with short profile names (such as @B or @joe). Possession of these OG accounts confers a measure of status and perceived influence and wealth in SIM swapping circles, as such accounts can often fetch thousands of dollars when resold in the underground.
And:
In a post on OGusers — a forum dedicated to account hijacking — a user named “Chaewon” advertised they could change email address tied to any Twitter account for $250, and provide direct access to accounts for between $2,000 and $3,000 apiece.
Great Dalrymple’s Beard!!! That can’t be real, can it?
Lucky225 said that just before 2 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, he received a password reset confirmation code via Google Voice for the @6 Twitter account. Lucky said he’d previously disabled SMS notifications as a means of receiving multi-factor codes from Twitter, opting instead to have one-time codes generated by a mobile authentication app.
But because the attackers were able to change the email address tied to the @6 account and disable multi-factor authentication, the one-time authentication code was sent to both his Google Voice account and to the new email address added by the attackers.
“The way the attack worked was that within Twitter’s admin tools, apparently you can update the email address of any Twitter user, and it does this without sending any kind of notification to the user,” Lucky told KrebsOnSecurity. “So [the attackers] could avoid detection by updating the email address on the account first, and then turning off 2FA.”
Lucky said he hasn’t been able to review whether any tweets were sent from his account during the time it was hijacked because he still doesn’t have access to it
Read the whole Krebs on Security post via the headline link. Fascinating and not a little scary. Amazing to me so little damage was done.
As I’ve said before, not convinced that this was the end of this particular misadventure. Would not be surprised if this was just some misdirection to hide a more critical unlocking event that will rear its head in the future.
This is just a great watch, Rene Ritchie presents a master class on Apple’s history with Arm and what it means today. If you have any interest in the Mac’s path to Apple silicon, this is incredibly informative and not too jargony.
Apple on Thursday released a note on its developer website that the company is updating its coding terminology. The changes will be across the company’s ecosystem.
“At Apple, we’re working to remove and replace non-inclusive language across our developer ecosystem, including within Xcode, platform APIs, documentation, and open source projects,” according to the note.
It’s clear that Apple has been working on these changes for months because they started appearing in documentation and betas during its annual Worldwide Developer Conference in June. You can’t make that kind of a switch on the fly with a couple of days’ notice. For example, Apple is now using terms such as “allow list” and “deny list” in its documentation.
Of particular note to developers is Apple’s APIs—you’ll want to keep an eye on this.
“Developer APIs with exclusionary terms will be deprecated as we introduce replacements across internal codebases, public APIs, and open source projects, such as WebKit and Swift,” Apple said on its website. “We encourage you to closely monitor deprecation warnings across your codebases and to proactively move to the latest APIs available in the platform SDKs.”
It’s good to see Apple being proactive about making these changes.
Camo is a new app for iPhone and iPad that allows you to repurpose your mobile device’s camera as a pro-quality webcam for your Mac that works with all your favorite applications.
Users can choose which lens to use on their iPhone, adjust video zoom, and control individual settings like saturation, exposure, temperature, and contrast. The iPhone’s flash can be controlled to adjust lighting, and users can even jump between multiple iOS devices during a call.
Out of the box there is a massive list of applications that Camo supports. This includes Zoom, Meet, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Slack, Google Chrome, WebEx Teams, QuickTime, and many others. There are more than 40 in total. At the moment FaceTime is left off the list, but is on the roadmap.
I’ve been a beta tester for Camo for a couple of weeks and, while it works mostly as advertised, $40/year to rent camera software seems steep for personal use considering simply plugging your iPhone into your Mac via USB and using the latest version of QuickTime accomplishes the same thing for free.
The biggest “advantage” Camo has is the ability to make adjustments to video zoom, saturation, exposure, etc. But if you already have good lighting, you may not need those features.
Just an FYI from a professional user of the software.
A Twitter insider was responsible for a wave of high profile account takeovers on Wednesday, according to leaked screenshots obtained by Motherboard and two sources who took over accounts.
And:
“We used a rep that literally done all the work for us,” one of the sources told Motherboard. The second source added they paid the Twitter insider. Motherboard granted the sources anonymity to speak candidly about a security incident. A Twitter spokesperson told Motherboard that the company is still investigating whether the employee hijacked the accounts themselves or gave hackers access to the tool.
And:
After a wave of account takeovers, screenshots of an internal Twitter user administration tool are being shared in the hacking underground.
And this response from Twitter:
After the publication of this piece, Twitter said in a tweet that “We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”
Were the employees duped by social engineering? Or was there complicity here, was a Twitter insider paid, as indicated by the article.
Also, there is some question as to whether the bitcoin scam was the hackers’ endgame. Or if access to the accounts opened a door that could be exploited later.
Terrific take on the iOS 14 beta, bike elevation data, and the benefits that came to wheelchair users. I’m hoping the Apple Maps and Accessibility team gets a look at this video, both for the bravo moment, as well as for the suggestions made for future releases.
Fantastic take from Seeking Alpha (free reg-wall). Just a few highlights from a much longer piece:
Apple has now grown up and realized it is not just about using content to sell devices. Eventually, those devices will stop being as profitable as they are now, but content (and the financial value of that content) lives forever.
And:
The pieces are now finally in place and Apple is steering itself into a new direction. It is showing the industry and shareholders that they have a real roadmap in place, and by next year (COVID-19 potentially notwithstanding), the company thinks it can (at a higher level) compete with the Netflix machine.
The “pieces” being the foundational elements of making and acquiring content, with Tom Hanks and Greyhound as a critical moment.
Greyhound being acquired and launching was step one – and again, make no mistake, the pandemic allowed Apple to basically bypass the lead-up to that step, because as mentioned, it had an award-level film literally drop in its lap. It also doesn’t hurt that this is going to be a very weak year for films because of all the delays, so the bar is not the same as in the past.
And:
Content is king, and Apple is putting together high-level packages that could siphon off projects that originally seemed earmarked for the Netflix pipeline.
On the heels of the blockbuster debut of “Greyhound,” and landing the highly anticipated films “Emancipation,” “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Snow Blind,” Apple is expanding its slate of sought-after original films with “Palmer,” starring Justin Timberlake and directed by Fisher Stevens, from SK Global.
And:
“Palmer” joins Apple original films including the recently announced “Snow Blind,” with Jake Gyllenhaal attached to star; Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming “Killers of the Flower Moon,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro; “Emancipation,” from director Antoine Fuqua and starring and produced by Academy Award nominee Will Smith; “Sharper,” a new film from Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka, starring and produced by Academy Award winner Julianne Moore; “The Sky is Everywhere,” based on the best-selling YA novel of the same name; and the upcoming feature “On the Rocks” from Sofia Coppola, starring Bill Murray and Rashida Jones.
This Apple original films strategy is a big part of why I am bullish on Apple TV+. Remember, Apple TV+ debuted last November, just a bit more than 8 months ago, rolled from scratch, with no back catalog.
What they’ve already achieved is nothing short of remarkable, and the team has set the stage for continued growth. To me, far more important than whether a particular show appeals to me is the wide variety of shows to choose from, and the fact that Apple is building systems to draw big stars and major projects to the platform. And all this less than a year after announcement.
Manuel “Matty” Moroun died on Monday at 93 years old. That name might not mean much to you if you’re not from metro Detroit or Windsor, Canada, but around these parts, he was known mainly as the billionaire who owned, among other things, the Ambassador Bridge, which just happens to carry roughly 27 percent of all merchandise trade between Canada and the U.S.
That’s $400 billion in trade a year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation with an average of $500 million in trade crossing the bridge daily. It generated $60 million in tolls for Moroun, according to the Detroit Free Press. At least 40 percent of trucking shipments into the US cross this bridge and the closest secondary crossing for big rigs is over two hours away, Forbes reports.
Not only is it the busiest international crossing in North America, but it is also the only one to be privately owned. Does it seem to you like this span is too important a crossing to be in private ownership?
Fascinating story about one of the most important border crossings in the world.
Today, Apple released software updates for all of its platforms, including the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and HomePod. The updates should be rolling out to users around the world throughout the day.
In general, the updates are fairly small in scope. As usual, iOS 13.6 and iPadOS 13.6 are the beefiest, but they’re still small. The flagship feature is the addition of support for digital car keys on the iPhone. Additionally, Apple has added voice-narrated stories to Apple News+, as well as expanded local news and customization options in the News app. There’s also a new “symptoms” category in the Health app, plus a variety of bug fixes.
Apple is expanding AppleCare+ monthly payment options to Canada, Australia, and Japan, allowing customers in these countries to pay for AppleCare+ for iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches on a monthly basis.
The online Apple Stores in Canada, Australia, and Japan aren’t yet providing monthly payment options when checking out after new device purchases, but an AppleCare+ support document confirms the feature is rolling out.
Good news for those of you who want to spread those payments out.
The comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) has arrived in the night sky here in the northern hemisphere, delighting skywatchers and photographers alike. With planning, patience, and clear skies, you can capture an unforgettable image of this celestial event.
Nobody knows for sure how long NEOWISE will be visible at night. In theory, the comet should be visible in the northwest evening sky later in July, but this is not guaranteed so shoot it while you can!
I went out last night with the 14 year old and we could see Neowise with an old pair of binoculars. We’ll try and get some photos this weekend.
Apple has introduced audio versions of select feature stories from Apple News+, a daily audio news briefing hosted by Apple News editors, and the beginning of curated local news collections in select areas.
Beginning on Wednesday, Apple News will produce audio stories, narrated by professional voice actors. Apple says that they are developed from some of the best feature reporting and long-form pieces published by Esquire, Essence, Fast Company, GQ, New York magazine, Sports Illustrated, Time, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Wired. Audio stories are now available to Apple News+ subscribers in the US.
The new “Apple News Today” daily audio news briefing is hosted by humita Basu and Duarte Geraldino. Apple News Today is free to all listeners in the US, can be found in the new Audio tab in Apple News or the Podcasts app, and will be available mornings Monday through Friday.
Along with deals from Verizon and Best Buy, as well as their own in-app offers, Apple seems to really be pushing to get more users for Apple News and subscribers to News+. Personally, I don’t think it’s going to work without an overhaul of the app and service.
The streaming wars adds a new contender today as NBCUniversal enters the ring with Peacock, a video streaming service that wants to take on the likes of Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Netflix, and Apple TV+.
Users can sign up for free and watch 13,000 hours of content for free. Peacock features commercials on its free and $4.99 tier.
The $4.99 tier, called Peacock Premium, includes access to new original content and earlier access to programming such as the ability to watch shows like America’s Got Talent, Saturday Night Live, Law & Order, and Chicago Fire the day after they air on TV. For $4.99/month though, users will still be subjected to ads (although they appear less frequently than users on the free plan).
Peacock’s most expensive offering costs $9.99 per month, somewhat awkwardly named Peacock Premium Plus. The content offering is the same as Peacock Premium, without any ads.
Yet another streaming service launches. Will you sign up? Right now, I wouldn’t if only because there’s no content on it that I want to watch that I haven’t already seen.
It goes without saying, don’t send any money to that Bitcoin account. It looks like 