More than 70 new emoji will be coming soon to iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac, including new characters with red hair, gray hair and curly hair, a new emoji for bald people, more emotive smiley faces and additional emoji representing animals, sports and food. The new emoji are available in today’s developer and public beta previews of iOS 12.1, and will be available in upcoming software updates for iOS, macOS and watchOS.

Everyone loves a good emoji.

I have no idea why I looked at these for so long, but I had to share.

But what if you prefer using 1Password as your default password manager? Or if not 1Password, something like LastPass or Dashlane? Don’t worry, with iOS 12 Password Autofill, it is entirely possible to change the autofill provider to your preferred password manager of choice, as long as it supports Apple’s new Password Manager API framework.

This is a great tip that I’m sure many people will use.

Apple Watch is undoubtedly one of my favorite Apple devices ever. It gives me information and notifications for everything I need, it helps me stay fit, and the new Series 4 device promises to watch my health like no Apple Watch before it.

I installed macOS Mojave shortly after it was introduced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June. There are a few features in Mojave that made the upgrade really great for me, so I’d like to tell you a bit more about those. […]

My thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. I’ve been using BBEdit since 1995, so I know first hand that it can handle any job I throw at it.

BBEdit is crafted and continuously refined in response to meet the needs of writers, web authors, and software developers, providing an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. All in all, BBEdit is a powerful editor with an interface that stays out of your way, and well worth checking out.

BBEdit 12 is 64-bit ready. Download and try it today!

Google today updated its popular Google Maps navigation app, introducing support for CarPlay. With iOS 12, third-party mapping apps work with CarPlay for the first time, giving CarPlay users an alternative to the built-in Apple Maps app.

I still use Apple Maps a lot, but I know this will be a popular feature for many users.

My thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. I’ve been using BBEdit since 1995, so I know first hand that it can handle any job I throw at it.

BBEdit is crafted and continuously refined in response to meet the needs of writers, web authors, and software developers, providing an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. All in all, BBEdit is a powerful editor with an interface that stays out of your way, and well worth checking out.

BBEdit 12 is 64-bit ready. Download and try it today!

I attended Apple’s iPhone event on Wednesday and spent a little time with the new products after everything was announced. I wanted to give you a few thoughts on the products and my overall feeling of the event. […]

We all should carry one of these.

Apple’s iPhone press event will be live streamed on Twitter for the first time, TechCrunch has confirmed. This news backs up an earlier report from last month, which claimed Apple would expand the ability to watch the event to Twitter’s platform, instead of only through Safari and Apple TV or Microsoft Edge on Windows 10, as in the past.

I wonder how many people will choose Twitter over the traditional streaming methods that Apple has used for years.

Amazon’s total market value passed $1 trillion on Tuesday, following Apple’s ascent into 13-digit territory at the beginning of August. Amazon and Apple now make up more than 8% of the entire value of the S&P 500, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst for S&P.

Amazon is, for the most part, a trusted brand by consumers. With its expansion into selling almost anything you can imagine, and the availability of quick shipping, many people will just default to shopping on Amazon these days. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Mercedes showed on Tuesday how it is “aggressively” gunning for top spot in upscale battery cars market currently dominated by Tesla, as it unveiled the EQC, its first fully electric car, at an event in Stockholm.

I love Mercedes. To me that brand is all about excellence in everything it does and every car it produces. More than loving the vehicles, I trust Mercedes—they are safe, long-lasting, and technologically advanced. If I were looking for an electric vehicle, that’s the company I would look to first.

After some years spent traveling the world, NetNewsWire is now back where it started! It’s my app again.

We’ve kept its room ready for all these years. And I am thrilled to welcome it home.

This is great news! I was a NetNewsWire user for many years and I can’t wait to see what Brent is going to do with it.

Verizon Wireless’ throttling of a fire department that uses its data services has been submitted as evidence in a lawsuit that seeks to reinstate federal net neutrality rules.

“County Fire has experienced throttling by its ISP, Verizon,” Santa Clara County Fire Chief Anthony Bowden wrote in a declaration. “This throttling has had a significant impact on our ability to provide emergency services. Verizon imposed these limitations despite being informed that throttling was actively impeding County Fire’s ability to provide crisis-response and essential emergency services.”

When the fire department called to ask them to stop throttling the connection, Verizon demanded they upgrade their plan.

Assholes.

Today we’re happy to announce a major new version of Dark Sky for iOS and Android. This update is one of the biggest overhauls in Dark Sky’s six year history. It represents over a year of effort, incorporating countless suggestions from our users as well as the experience we’ve gained building our weather service from the ground up these past years.

I love this app and I trust what it says.

Back to My Mac will not be available on macOS Mojave. You can get ready now by learning about alternatives for file access, screen sharing, and remote desktop access.

An alert popped up on my Mac this morning warning that the Back to My Mac service was ending soon and linked to a support article on Apple’s Web site. It’s too bad, I really enjoyed the service, but it’s not like you don’t have options—Apple details everything in the support document.

Lyft has completed more than 5,000 self-driving rides through its ride-hailing app, the company said on Tuesday, as it aims to become a serious competitor in autonomous driving while its biggest rival, Uber, retrenches.

I always said that I wouldn’t want to take a self-driving Lyft ride, but I changed my mind. I would really like to see this technology in action.

You can share files you’ve synced to iCloud with friends and colleagues who have an Apple ID using the step-by-step guide below. Whether you’re sharing from a Mac or an iPhone, you’ll be able to give people one-way access to the file, or allow them to modify the document if you’re collaborating on a piece of work.

Great tip!

Aretha Franklin, whose gospel-rooted singing and bluesy yet expansive delivery earned her the title “the Queen of Soul,” has died, a family statement said Thursday. She was 76.

The “official cause of death was due to advanced pancreatic cancer of the neuroendocrine type, which was confirmed by Franklin’s oncologist, Dr. Philip Phillips of Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit,” the family statement said.

It’s a sad day. Aretha was one of the absolute greats!

It’s not as if there’s some other mysterious force that maintains Twitter’s API platform, and now poor ol’ Twitter is forced to shut down old technology because there’s simply no other recourse. No.

Twitter, in fact, is the one responsible for its User Streams and Site Streams APIs – the APIs that serve the core functions of these now deprecated third-party Twitter clients. Twitter is the reason these APIs have been stuck in a beta state for nearly a decade. Twitter is the one that decided not to invest in supporting those legacy APIs, or shift them over to its new API platform.

Ugh, Twitter. They don’t like their users. They don’t like the developers that helped make the platform successful. I don’t think they really like themselves. If there is a bad decision that can be made, Twitter will find a way to do it—they’ve proven that over and over again.

Say “May, 2018” and you’ll go right back. Ask for “Cupertino” and you’ll be there. Combine the places and times and Siri will take you anywhere — and any when — you want to go!

Good tip. It sure beats scrolling endlessly looking for a particular photo.

As part of version 9.6 of Universal Audio’s software, the company released the Century Tube Channel Strip, Suhr PT100 Amplifier, and the Brainworx bx_masterdesk. The part of the release that I’m most looking forward to is the Bill Putnam Microphone Collection.

For use with the Townsend Labs Sphere L22 microphone system, the Bill Putnam Collection plug-in features the “best-of-the-best” from iconic engineer and recording pioneer Bill Putnam Sr.’s personal mic locker, including hand-picked mics that recorded Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, and more.

Yes, please!

Missouri Education Watchdog: While many have questioned Google’s invasion of the classroom and how Google Apps for Education, (now called G-Suite), collects and uses student or teacher information, few have really gotten much in the way of answers. What is … Continued