Matt Fuller:

I recently acquired several new Apple Watch bands of different types. Among them, I decided to splurge on my very first (and likely last) Apple Watch Hermès item for my collection—the Apple Watch Hermès 45 mm Navy Single Tour Band.

And:

Inside, the Apple Watch Hermès band is not in cardboard, but enrobed in a luxurious microfiber pouch with a familiar texture and configuration.

And:

Upon closer inspection, the pouch appears to be made from the same material as the now famous Apple Polishing Cloth, the $19 cloth that enjoyed about a month of media hype in 2021.

Follow the headline link and scroll down to the very last image, a side-by-side of the polishing cloth draped over the Apple Watch Hermès band pouch. Tap/click a few times to embiggen and you’ll definitely get a sense that these are, indeed, made of the same material.

Any other Apple product ship with this material? Do the Mac Pro wheels come with a wheel-polishing cloth?

Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:

When listening to a song from your music library on iPhone and iPad, it used to be possible to ask ‌Siri‌ to “rate this song five [or whatever number] stars,” and the virtual assistant would do so without fuss.

And:

Yet reports on Reddit, Apple Support Communities, and the MacRumors forums suggest that the function is not available in ‌iOS 15‌ or iOS 15.1, and has remained out of action in the latest iOS 15.2 point release, issued in December. Instead of carrying out the request, ‌Siri‌ responds with “I’m Sorry, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” or some variation thereof.

This issue has been out in the wild for a while (here’s a Reddit thread from about a month ago), but the hope was that this was a bug, rather than an actual permanent change.

You can still set star ratings on your Mac and in iOS/iPadOS (you’ll need to enable the Show Star Ratings setting first).

Definitely a mixed message. Are star ratings going away permanently? Are they coming (albeit eventually) to Siri?

Schrödinger’s ratings.

BBEdit 14 is out and has added a new “Notes” feature, which provides a large variety of ways to create notes that automatically save themselves, and, perhaps more important, automatically title themselves so that you don’t end up wondering which of your 305 “untitled text” documents is the one you’re looking for.

BBEdit 14 enables several new features and significant improvements to its built-in coding aids for developers, including:

• Enhanced language-specific text completions;
• Improved Find Definition;
• Assistance for specifying function parameters;
• New code-navigation features;
• In-window highlighting of syntax and semantic issues;
• Language-specific document reformatting.

These feature improvements are the result of new built-in support for the Language Server Protocol (“LSP”) by which user-installed local “language servers” implement key language-sensitive behaviors.

My thanks to Unite for sponsoring The Loop this week. Unite 4 for macOS allows you to turn any website into an app on your Mac. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.

Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, M1 support, and much more. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.

Some examples of apps you could create in mere minutes with Unite:

• A Gmail web client that behaves like a native mail client.
• A status bar app for Apple Music or Overcast
• An isolated workspace for apps that may track you like Facebook
• A lightweight and power efficient version of Slack, Discord, or Whatsapp with full notification support
• A fully featured Instagram app that has a resizable window, unlike the M1 version.
• A Robinhood, Figma, or Roam Research app for your desktop.

The Loop readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 or when you use the promo code ‘LOOPINSIGHT’ at checkout.

You can also try Unite for 14 days absolutely free or use it as part of your subscription if you’re a Setapp subscriber!

Google Project Zero blog:

We want to thank Citizen Lab for sharing a sample of the FORCEDENTRY exploit with us, and Apple’s Security Engineering and Architecture (SEAR) group for collaborating with us on the technical analysis.

And:

Recently, however, it has been documented that NSO is offering their clients zero-click exploitation technology, where even very technically savvy targets who might not click a phishing link are completely unaware they are being targeted. In the zero-click scenario no user interaction is required. Meaning, the attacker doesn’t need to send phishing messages; the exploit just works silently in the background. Short of not using a device, there is no way to prevent exploitation by a zero-click exploit; it’s a weapon against which there is no defense.

And:

The ImageIO library, as detailed in a previous Project Zero blogpost, is used to guess the correct format of the source file and parse it, completely ignoring the file extension. Using this “fake gif” trick, over 20 image codecs are suddenly part of the iMessage zero-click attack surface, including some very obscure and complex formats, remotely exposing probably hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

There’s a lot of detail here, fascinating if understanding exploits is your thing. But bottom line, a fake GIF is used to Trojan horse image processing code into life, and that code does the bad work, no clicks required.

Most importantly:

Apple inform us that they have restricted the available ImageIO formats reachable from IMTranscoderAgent starting in iOS 14.8.1 (26 October 2021), and completely removed the GIF code path from IMTranscoderAgent starting in iOS 15.0 (20 September 2021), with GIF decoding taking place entirely within BlastDoor.

Make sure you (and the folks you support) update to the latest and greatest.

See also: After US ban and Apple action, Pegasus spyware maker NSO running out of cash.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc., facing a resurgence in Covid-19 cases and a fast-spreading new variant, is delaying its corporate return-to-office deadline from Feb. 1 to a “date yet to be determined.”

Employees were informed of the move via a memo sent by Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook on Wednesday. An Apple spokesman confirmed the decision to Bloomberg News.

Add to the mix three Apple Store closings (Miami, Ottawa, and Annapolis, Maryland).

Hard to judge whether this is the road to a new normal (masks for many, more vaccines more often, periodic store closings in response to infection upticks) or just a bump in the road.

Amazon:

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Polly’s Text-to-Speech (TTS) service uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize natural sounding human speech.

Follow the headline link and click on the various links to get a sense of the voices. Start with Joanna (Standard). Pretty good, but there’s still a bit of uncanny valley there, perhaps in the subtle hesitations you likely wouldn’t expect in someone else’s speech.

Now listen to Joanna (Neural). To me, this sounds much more realistic and is the machine learning version of the same voice.

Good enough to fool you into thinking it’s a real person? Certainly getting closer.

Apple:

Today, Apple TV+ announced “El Deafo,” a charming and poignant three-part animated series for kids and families. Based on the No. 1 New York Times best-seller and Newbery Honor-winning graphic memoir, all episodes of “El Deafo” will premiere Friday, January 7, 2022 on Apple TV+.

And:

“El Deafo” follows perceptive young Cece (voiced by Finigan) as she loses her hearing and finds her inner superhero. Going to school and making new friends can be tough. Having to do both while wearing a bulky hearing aid on your chest? That takes superpowers! With a little help from her superhero alter ego El Deafo, Cece learns to embrace what makes her extraordinary.

Watch the trailer below. Love the story premise, the normalization, representation. Love that all the episodes are dropping at once, too.

Caviar:

While most of its smartphones feature gold, jewels, or over-the-top designs, the luxury brand’s latest takes on the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max feature a far more understated design and a really cool tribute to the late Apple founder Steve Jobs. For the phone, Caviar’s artists used the unique design of the iPhone 13 Pro and combined it with parts from a first-generation iPhone.

And:

In the center of the back of the body is a sealed capsule in the shape of Apple’s signature bitten apple with a fragment of the original iPhone 2G motherboard.

And:

Caviar’s iPhone 2G versions of the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max are limited to 19 pieces and retail for $6,990.

What to get for the person whose Apple Watch Series 1 18kt Edition no longer works.

Benjamin Mayo maintains a page that lets you view all the various Apple TV screen savers, with the ability to switch to your screen saver of choice and pause and scrub through as you like.

The Apple TV periodically fetches new videos from an Apple server. This page interprets that data source and shows all the possible videos that the Aerial screensavers can include. This page is automatically refreshed and kept up-to-date as Apple adds new videos into the rotation.

Apple just added two new screen savers. From this 9to5Mac post:

As part of the tvOS 15.2 release yesterday, Apple announced it was adding new Apple TV screensavers featuring aerial flythroughs of Iceland and Scotland.

Follow the headline link and enjoy.

Alexa.com (via MJTsai’s blog):

We will be retiring Alexa.com on May 1, 2022

Twenty-five years ago, we founded Alexa Internet. After two decades of helping you find, reach, and convert your digital audience, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Alexa.com on May 1, 2022. Thank you for making us your go-to resource for content research, competitive analysis, keyword research, and so much more.

Alexa.com was the go-to site to check web traffic. Back in the day, there were a handful of companies that regularly dominated the web traffic rankings. Memory serves, nytimes.com and Kottke.org were always near the top of the list.

From the Alexa Wikipedia page:

Alexa was founded as an independent company in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stock.

Have to wonder when Amazon made the decision to use that name for its voice assistant and how much it helped that decision that they owned this domain.

Also wondering why they are shutting down the site. Is something new coming to Alexa.com, or is this purely not a viable business for Amazon?

Reddit user Heyyoudvd:

I’m not sure if anyone is interested in this, but I recently got a call from Tim Cook’s office, which I thought was pretty cool.

This is a pretty good read, very interesting to see things that catch Tim and team’s attention.

Once you’re done reading all about App Privacy Report and adding a Legacy Contact, follow the headline link and allow Juli Clover, MacRumors, to walk you through all the rest of the goodies that came with iOS 15.2.

There really is just a ton of new stuff. If nothing else, scan all the headlines just so you are aware of what’s new.

No one likes to think about death. Of course. But do spend a few minutes thinking about adding a legacy contact to your Apple ID. Or helping your again relatives add legacy contacts to their Apple ID. It’s important.

Follow the headline link for all the details but in a nutshell:

Starting in iOS 15.2, iPadOS 15.2, and macOS 12.1, Apple users can add a Legacy Contact for their Apple ID. Adding a Legacy Contact is the easiest, most secure way to give someone they trust access to the data they stored in their Apple account after they pass away. This data may include photos, messages, notes, files, apps they downloaded, device backups, and more.

And, very importantly:

Certain information, like movies, music, books, or subscriptions they purchased with their Apple ID, and data stored in their Keychain, like payment information and passwords, can’t be accessed by a Legacy Contact.

To add a Legacy Contact on your iPhone:

• In Settings, tap your name
• Now tap Password & Security > Legacy Contact
• Tap Add Legacy Contact

You’ll get an access key, which you’ll share with your Legacy Contact. The choosing of your contact and the sharing of the access key is all part of the process. Apple makes this very easy.

To access your account, your LC will need that access key, along with a death certificate. Meaning, they won’t be able to access your account while you are still alive.

Here’s a link to the page that lets you request access to a deceased friend or family member’s account.

Kirk McElhearn, Intego blog:

A new feature in iOS and iPadOS 15.2 is the App Privacy Report. Your iPhone or iPad can record and display activity carried out by apps, such as which apps access your location, contacts, or photos, which apps access a network, websites that contact trackers, and more. You can then view a detailed report of this activity over the past seven days.

To turn on App Privacy Report (can’t think of a reason not to):

• Go to Settings > Privacy > App Privacy Report
• Tap “Turn On App Privacy Report”

That’s it. The results will start appearing on that same page as you start using various apps.

Kirk’s walkthrough is worth reading. He does a great job painting a picture of what kinds of results you might see, how to dig into those results, and what the data actually indicates.

Bookmark, pass along.

Unite 4 for macOS allows you to turn any website into an app on your Mac. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.

Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, M1 support, and much more. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.

Some examples of apps you could create in mere minutes with Unite:

• A Gmail web client that behaves like a native mail client.
• A status bar app for Apple Music or Overcast
• An isolated workspace for apps that may track you like Facebook
• A lightweight and power efficient version of Slack, Discord, or Whatsapp with full notification support
• A fully featured Instagram app that has a resizable window, unlike the M1 version.
• A Robinhood, Figma, or Roam Research app for your desktop.

The Loop readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 or when you use the promo code ‘LOOPINSIGHT’ at checkout.

You can also try Unite for 14 days absolutely free or use it as part of your subscription if you’re a Setapp subscriber!

Ankur Thakur, iDownloadBlog, walks through all the different ways you can use Shazam on your iPhone and, more importantly, shows you how to find your multiple Shazam histories. Yes, multiple histories.

1. On iPhone, launch the iTunes Store app, the tap the Siri tab. That’s the list of songs you asked Siri to identify
2. Launch the Shazam app, tap the My Music sheet at the bottom of the screen. A different list, songs you’ve used the app to identify
3. Pull down on Control Center, press and hold the Shazam icon (assuming it’s installed in Control Center) for yet a third list.

Read the article, it’s well done, there’s lots more to it. Don’t miss the bit about automatically creating a playlist of your Shazam requests.

Click the headline link to see the current stock price. Look at the data table for the term market cap.

As I type this, Apple’s stock price is $180.54 and their market cap is $2.94T.

It’d take about a 2% rise in the share price for Apple to hit $3T. Not unreasonable. Uncharted territory.

(To be clear, not a prediction, just an observation).

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

While multiple reports indicate that Apple is working on a direct successor to 2020’s ‌MacBook Air‌, a recent rumor from the leaker known as “Dylandkt” claimed that this new model may not be branded as the “‌MacBook Air‌.” Instead, it would simply be the “MacBook.”

And:

In recent years, Apple has sold two main ‌iMac‌ models: a 21.5-inch model and a more powerful 27-inch model. Earlier this year, the 21.5-inch model was replaced with an all-new 24-inch model with the M1 chip. The 27-inch model has yet to receive a redesign or an update with Apple silicon, but another rumor from Dylandkt claims that the new model could actually be called the “‌iMac‌ Pro.”

I love the simplification here, hope this rumor turns out to be true. If so, we’d have MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, iMac Pro, and Mac Pro.

This simplification concept reminds me strongly of the simple product matrix Steve Jobs rolled out in 1998, best described by Steve himself. Watch the video below for the explanation (the entire video is worth watching, but jump to 9 minutes in if time is short).

Jonathan Bell, with photos by Jonathan Schmidt, for Wallpaper:

Led by Evans Hankey and Alan Dye, the Apple Design Team holds enormous sway over our evolving relationship with technology. Opening the doors to their studio at Apple Park in Cupertino for the first time, they offered us a deep dive into the working processes behind their latest creations

And:

There are 12,000 employees on site here, including the Apple Design Team. This agile but hugely significant department thinks in terms of scope, not scale.

Working side by side to guide this division are Evans Hankey, Apple’s VP of industrial design, and Alan Dye, VP of human interface design. Both close colleagues, confidants and friends of Jony Ive, they effectively took the helm of the Design Team after his departure from the chief design officer role in 2019.

This is a long, fun read. If nothing else, follow the headline link and scan through the photos.

That first one shows a breathtaking view from the fourth floor inside Apple Park. The third shows Evans Hankey, VP of industrial design, and Alan Dye, VP of human interface design, in the Design Studio. Scroll down a bit more and you’ll see a model maker assembling camera modules for iPhone 13 Pro camera lenses into cosmetic models.

Wonderful stuff.

Elaine Glusac, New York Times:

If it’s been a year or more since you traveled, particularly internationally, you may notice something different at airports in the United States: More steps — from checking a bag to clearing customs — are being automated using biometrics.

And:

Many of the latest biometric developments use facial recognition, which the National Institute of Standards and Technology recently found is at least 99.5 percent accurate, rather than iris-scanning or fingerprints.

99.5% accurate means that 1 out of 200 is inaccurate. Just saying.

“Iris-scanning has been touted as the most foolproof,” said Sherry Stein, the head of technology in the Americas for SITA, a Switzerland-based biometrics tech company. “For biometrics to work, you have to be able to match to a known trusted source of data because you’re trying to compare it to a record on file. The face is the easiest because all the documents we use that prove your identity — driver’s licenses, passports etc. — rely on face.”

Delta has implemented a passport based program at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport:

In November, Delta Air Lines launched a new digital identity program for T.S.A. PreCheck members at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport who can opt in to using facial recognition to do everything from checking a bag to clearing security and boarding their domestic flight.

Opting in requires the passenger to enter their U.S. passport number, which provides the back-end check on your identity using your passport photo, even though the new program is domestic only.

Another program, for international flyers, in Chicago:

Returning from Iceland to Chicago O’Hare International Airport in October, I approached the airport kiosk that normally scans your passport and fingerprints and gets Global Entry members like me past Customs and Border Protection agents in the span of a few minutes. This time, the kiosk took my picture only, spat out a copy, which included my name and passport details, and sped me past agents in under a minute.

This future is coming, fast and furious. How well protected will this treasure trove of biometric data be? Seems clear it’ll be a relentless target for state actors. How long will it be until we start reading headlines about biometric data hacks?

Luz Lazo, Washington Post:

The D.C. Council on Tuesday approved a measure to give D.C. residents access to digital versions of their driver’s license or identification card on their phone.

The legislation, which passed unanimously, gives the Department of Motor Vehicles authority to issue digital credentials and lets residents present identification in an electronic format, such as on a smartphone, instead of a physical credential, except when prohibited by federal law.

Obviously, this impacts Washington DC residents, but is a testbed for digital ID everywhere. It’d make it possible to use your phone as ID for things like cashing a check, showing your ID at a bar, or when buying alcohol, buying drugs at a pharmacy, getting through security at the airport, etc.

It does seem like digital ID is an inevitable part of our future. One issue this raises: If I get stopped by the police and I don’t carry a physical ID card, I’ll have to hand my phone over to prove my identity. My hope is that the concept of an ID on the Lock Screen, with the bare minimum of information displayed, becomes a standard.

This serves the dual purpose of protecting my privacy (my phone remains locked) and providing the information required by the requestor (proof of ID for the police, my birth date only for the clerk at the liquor store).