This is an easy read with lots of interesting detail on Photos and non-destructive editing. Worth your time, and from an excellent source.

From the bio at the end of the article:

Nik Bhatt, formerly Senior Director of Engineering at Apple, led the Aperture and iPhoto engineering teams for several years. Afterward, he led imaging teams for Apple’s photo applications, including the teams responsible for Core Image and Apple’s RAW Camera library. He is now the developer of RAW Power, an advanced photo editing app for Mac and iOS.

Read the article.

World of difference. Apple Maps, improving steadily.

https://twitter.com/rvdsteege/status/1139264604918485005

Click the headline link, don’t look away or you’ll miss it. Don’t ever remember Apple honoring a sports franchise like this. I kind of love it.

Click the link, click the colors, read the descriptions. Well done.

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Apple upgraded CarPlay in iOS 12 with support for third-party navigation apps including Google Maps and Waze, allowing drivers to use alternatives to Apple Maps for the first time. CarPlay has an even bigger update in iOS 13 with the introduction of Dashboard, new apps, and updates to existing apps.

This is a pretty solid rethinking of the CarPlay interface. Yet another example of Apple firing on all cylinders.

Digiday:

Headphones are a fact of life inside open plan offices, but Airpods have quickly become a staple of life at ad agency life, with staffers walking around all day with the signature little pods in their ears.

And:

“I know they’re not listening to music, or anything, but it’s still disconcerting to see them with something in their ears while we’re all discussing something,” said one agency CEO, who said he once had a meeting with someone wearing Airpods. “It’s like, ‘what?’”

Fascinating piece. I’ve had plenty of conversations with people with AirPods in my own ears, and/or with AirPods in theirs. One key difference between AirPods and Beats Powerbeats Pro is the ability to hear background noise. The Powerbeats Pro are designed to wedge tightly into the ear canal, making conversation more difficult, at least to me, than with AirPods in my ears.

And the almost viral spread of AirPods means more people keeping them in their ears on a regular basis.

“Airpods are a totally different phenomenon,” said Michelle Edelman, Petermayer evp and chief strategy officer. “The product is honestly good, but wearing them 24/7 is going to mess with the notion of when you can and can’t disturb someone. So it’ll change social norms if people just start to leave them in during meetings.”

And:

“Just yesterday, I was walking on the street listening to a partner review some important data with me and a woman stopped me to ask for directions as she didn’t see my Airpods,” she said. “I had to do that thing where I listened to two people talk to me at once for about a minute before telling both of them I didn’t hear what either of them said.”

Or it could be the woman didn’t see AirPods as a sign that you were necessarily unavailable for listening.

Very interesting article.

James Vincent, The Verge:

Shazam can be an incredibly useful app, able to identify songs and find lyrics for them just by listening to the audio. But one big annoyance has been the software’s inability to ‘hear’ music playing through a device’s headphones. Instead, users have to play the song through internal speakers or find a way to direct the sound to their phone or tablet’s microphone.

Not any more. A new feature called Pop-up Shazam in the latest Android version of the app works with audio played through headphones with Shazam working in the background.

As soon as I read this I thought, cool, been waiting for this. But try as I might, could not get this to work in iOS.

If you are listening to the Music app via headphones in iOS, you can fire up Shazam or ask Siri what’s playing. Works perfectly. But if you are watching YouTube via headphones, or perhaps Netflix, Hulu, etc., there does not appear to be a way for Siri or Shazam to hear what you’re hearing.

Not a big deal, but I thought it was interesting that this feature came to Android, given that Apple owns Shazam.

If you do know of a way to Shazam music played through headphones, please reply to this tweet.

The kicker? It’s a swimming record.

AirPods are everywhere.

Jon Alper:

Minimizing the compromises while maximizing flexibility is a the core design theme of this Mac. It’s a profoundly different direction from the 2013 Mac Pro in all the best an most unexpected ways. Arguably, even if you never buy one, it’s an expensive (for Apple to make, not just for customers to buy) message from Apple practically shouting: ‘’We’re committed to the Mac, we’re listening to our customers and we understand some of them need something wholly unlike an iMac let alone a laptop.”

And:

It’s not a sports car. This is realization of the 2010 Steve Jobs’ quote: “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy” .This truck is a thundering, earth mover of a truck.

This is an epic read, full of insight and detail. Even if you have no intention of ever buying a Mac Pro, if you’re an Apple follower, I think you’ll enjoy this read. Well done, Jon.

[H/T AAPL Tree]

Kirk McElhearn:

With macOS 10.15 Catalina, and the splitting of iTunes into three apps (Music, Podcasts, and Apple TV), media files will be handled a bit differently. Here’s where the various files will be located.

It’s a beta, so this info could change.

Jonny Evans lays out the myriad ways in which Apple Maps has gotten better. Terrific read.

One specific feature I’ve noticed is the addition of traffic lights and stop signs in iOS 13. Apple Maps is definitely getting much, much better.

Ina Fried, Axios:

Apple pitches itself as the most privacy-minded of the big tech companies, and indeed it goes to great lengths to collect less data than its rivals. Nonetheless, the iPhone maker will still know plenty about you if you use many of its services: In particular, Apple knows your billing information and all the digital and physical goods you have bought from it, including music, movie and app purchases.

But:

Apple uses a number of techniques to either minimize how much data it has or encrypt it so that Apple doesn’t have access to iMessages and similar personal communications.

And:

Apple is able to do this, in part, because it makes its money from selling hardware, and increasingly from selling services, rather than through advertising. (It does have some advertising business, and it also gets billions of dollars per year from Google in exchange for being Apple’s default search provider.)

This is the setup. The article itself digs into how Apple does all this and the specifics, for a number of Apple services, on what Apple knows and how they protect your privacy.

If you care about the issue of privacy, take the time to visit Apple’s official privacy site, and read the various article’s Ina has linked at the bottom of her article, to the specifics of what Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. know about you.