Android Authority:

Although iOS and Android devices are more similar now than ever, there are a few specific features that iPhone users have that Android users don’t (or vice versa). The most prevalent of these features is iMessage, the Apple-exclusive messaging app that signifies Android users with a green bubble.

While this seems fairly innocuous and even necessary, the “green bubble” feature has taken on a life of its own — and not in a good way. Some iPhone users the world over — but mostly in the United States — mock the green bubbles that appear in their iMessage feed, even going so far as to create colloquialisms such as “green texts don’t get texts back.”

This issue has to be one of the funniest “First World” problems I’ve read about in a while. But there is a justification for some of us – not everyone has unlimited text messages. Here in the backwater that is Canada, some of us still get charged for every incoming and outgoing text/SMS/”green bubble” message. If you’ve got a child who is an active user of text messages, that can add up quickly and cost real money.

Tom’s Guide:

Apple’s newest product has generated breathless hype. It all started with an onstage unveiling by CEO Tim Cook last March, and it continued with an invitation-only enrollment process. Now, almost anyone can get their hands on the product. But this isn’t a device like a new iPhone, Apple Watch or some other Apple gadget — it’s a credit card.

I’ve been using Apple Card for about a week, most of that time without a physical credit card in hand. There’s a lot to like about Apple Card. If you’re in the market for a cash-back credit card and can take on the responsibility of a new credit line, it’s a useful tool.

Good overview of the Apple Card.

Kottke:

Listen in as Anthony Vincent covered Metallica’s classic Enter Sandman in 20 different musical styles, ranging from yodeling to The Eurythmics to Hans Zimmer to Lil Uzi Vert to John Denver.

This is brilliant. I don’t play the guitar but I’ve always wanted to learn just so I could play the opening riff to Enter Sandman.

UPROXX:

In the press, U2 and Apple were called “inconsiderate,” “kinda creepy,” and “tone-deaf,” and even likened to Big Brother from George Orwell’s 1984. Customers complained that uploading Songs Of Innocence was a grievous invasion of privacy. And they were offended that a band as, well, old and uncool as U2 had encroached on the sanctity of their digital music collections. Many people took to social media to register their displeasure, including the rapper Tyler The Creator, who memorably compared the indignity of finding Songs Of Innocence on his phone to “waking up with a pimple or like a herpes … F*ck Bono. I didn’t ask for you, I’m mad.”

But looking back all these years later, I can’t help but wonder: Why were we so mad about U2 putting a free album on our phones? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live again in a pre-Trump world, where you had the luxury to get worked up about a so-called Orwellian scheme involving a melancholic late-period U2 record? Isn’t it crazy that people cared so much about this?

Oh, it’s crazy now and it was all kinds of crazy then.

New York Times:

The caller read out the numbers at a speed evoking an auctioneer on fast-forward, each multidigit figure blurring into the next.

Within seconds, Daiki Kamino’s right arm shot up in the air, triumphant. Not only had he heard every number, he had tabulated them and arrived at the correct, 16-digit sum: 8,186,699,633,530,061.

He did it all on an abacus.

I’ve since lost the knowledge but I was taught as a kid how to use an abacus. It was fun and actually fairly easy for ordinary math problems.

This is a fascinating resource. At the very least, scroll through to see some of the user data collecting that you can opt-out of.

These are just creepy.

[H/T Dane Jorgensen]

Apple posted a page on cleaning your Apple Card. This is real.

One particular highlight from the page:

Some fabrics, like leather and denim, might cause permanent discoloration that will not wash off.

I have to say, this is some upper echelon marketing. Can you imagine if Capital One or CitiBank sent you instructions on cleaning your credit card?

But there’s more.

Not sure what factors came into play here, but here’s one user’s card after two months in a leather wallet. Not so precious.

Also, there’s a new Apple Card Twitter account. Kind of hoping for some Wendy’s / Burger King level comedy, but I won’t hold my breath. Until the other credit card companies get together and create accounts to get this rivalry started.

Ryan Christoffel, MacStories:

Often when I try something new, however, I’m immediately confronted with the obstacle of a login screen. At which point there’s a choice to make: do I go through the hassle of creating an account for this service, or – if the option is available – do I simply authenticate via a third party like Google or Facebook? Sadly, neither option is ideal.

And:

When apps update to adopt Sign In with Apple, I suspect many users’ initial thoughts will be some variation of what immediately popped into my mind after trying it for the first time: “Where has this been all my life?”

It’s going to take a while, but I’m looking forward to this rolling out across the appiverse, becoming the standard rather than the exception.

Too much power in one company’s hands? Hey, I’d rather it be Apple than anyone else.

I love my iPhone XR. As I’ve discussed on the podcast, I started with an iPhone XS Max, then “downgraded” to the XR. Price, crazy battery life, color choices were all big wins for me. I did give up screen and camera advances, but no regrets.

It’ll be interesting to see the divide between the next generation iPhones. We shall soon see.

Mashable:

Everyone uses Bluetooth. Perhaps they shouldn’t.

The technology that we’ve come to rely on to connect our phones, smart speakers, cars, vibrators, and toasters is problematic for reasons more serious than pairing issues. Bluetooth has been shown time and time again to be a security and privacy nightmare — albeit one that can be mostly solved with a simple toggling of an off switch.

I got pointed to this Mashable (I know, I know) post by someone and it’s a good object lesson in checking before you post. On its face, it sounds silly but it may be possible. So I checked with my favourite security guy, Rich Mogull of DisruptOps.

I asked Rich, “Is this sensationalism by Mashable (that wouldn’t be a surprise) or a “real” issue?” Rich responded with these tweets:

Saying you should stop using Bluetooth is the kind of disconnected, unrealistic security advice that results in security people not being invited to anyone else’s parties.

The flaw is real and very serious. It’s also manageable by vendors enforcing min key length.

I followed up with, “Which begs the question, “Do vendors enforce min key length?” Does “min key length” mean passwords or something else? Is that something on the user end or vendor-side?”

Rich said:

It is the length of the encryption key used in pairing… nothing a user can control. All on the vendor side. I think most or all Apple devices (and Microsoft, according to press releases) are protected.

So, Bluetooth could be a security and privacy nightmare but it’s not. Thanks Rich.

The Verge:

THX’s long-running “bwonnnnnnnnnnnnnng” Deep Tone sound that plays before movies just got a lavish new update.

It’s still recognizable to cinephiles, but the version heard in the trailer above is much crisper than the original tone that played before Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi in 1983. There have been more than 20 remixed versions of the tone since then, including special versions made for The Simpsons and Shrek. Everyone knows it! It’s a meme! People remix the tone into their songs because it’s universally understood.

In my younger days, this sound before the beginning of a movie sent tingles down my spine. It meant I was about to see a “good movie.” As I got older, I realized it means I’m going to see a movie with (probably) good sound but no promises as to how good the actual movie will be.

The Verge:

Famous actors and musicians, the head of the US Department of Energy, and regular Instagram users have been spreading a hoax memo that claims the company will soon have permission to make deleted photos and messages public and use those posts against them in court.

The claims are fake and the assertions don’t make a lot of sense, but that hasn’t stopped it from being spread by some major names concerned about the implications. Celebrities including Usher, Judd Apatow, and Julia Roberts posted the note to their feeds, as did Rick Perry, the current United States secretary of energy and former Texas governor.

Be smarter and more aware than these people.

Washington Post:

Apple plans to change the rules it has for kids apps, raising concerns among some app developers about the way the tech giant wields power unilaterally over an App Store that has become an industry unto itself.

Under the new rules, which Apple had planned to implement next month, kids apps on Apple’s App Store will be banned from using external analytics software — invisible lines of code that collect extremely detailed information about who is using an app and how. Apple is also severely curtailing their ability to sell ads, which underpins the business model that results in many apps being free. The changes were prompted in part by some children viewing inappropriate ads, Apple says.

The new rules pit Apple’s privacy prerogative against an overreach of its power.

This isn’t an intractable problem but Apple needs to live up to its privacy declarations particularly when it comes to apps targeted at children.

PC Mag:

PCMag surveyed 1,000 parents with children in grades ranging from preschool to college to gauge when they think is the right time to buy their kids a smartphone, tablet, laptop, and smart speaker. For smartphones, the majority (53 percent) of parents said age 12 to 15 is appropriate for kids to get their own phone. Another 23 percent said ages 9 to 11, and 17 percent said not until ages 16 to 18.

Parents were far more divided on tablets.

We are going through this little exercise in our house with the 13-year-old. He’s already got an iPhone and an iPad mini. He wants a laptop and smart speaker next.

Nomad:

At Nomad, we are passionate about wild places, adventures, and unspoiled nature. We’ve grown a lot since our first Kickstarter in 2012, expanding our product range, our internal team, and our company goals. Along with all this company growth, our carbon footprint and impact on the places we love has grown too.

So we’ve decided that a big part of our mission going forward will be to reduce our impact while leading the way towards a more sustainable future. Nomad is going carbon neutral.

I’m a big fan of Nomad the company and their cables specifically. I’ve used one of their Universal cables every day for the past year and it looks brand new. The offer here is to buy their 1.5m Lightning cable. Donate $5, $10, or $20 and get the cable for free. Nomad will ensure 100% of your donations are delivered to Carbonfund. The biggest downside of this promotion is it’s only really available to those inside the US. International shipping is brutal at $30.

BoingBoing:

Founded in 1623 in Turkey and now based in Norwell, Massachusetts, Zildjian has manufactured cymbals continuously for almost 400 years. This is how they do it now.

Regular readers know I’m a sucker for “making of” assembly line videos. I love this one.

This is a great walkthrough from 9to5Mac’s Jeff Benjamin. The games I’m seeing so far really click for me, look like my kind of games.

From the video, Jeff seems to agree. If the price is, as rumored, $4.99 a month for 100+ games, seems a no-brainer to me.

Watch the video, judge for yourself.

John Gruber, commenting on this BuzzFeed article, which makes the claim that Apple Card was created to lock you in to the Apple ecosystem:

I don’t think the reason for this is to keep you locked to your iPhone, although that’s certainly a side effect. I think this simply reflects Apple’s internal culture. Apple’s culture is to make native apps for everything as a first priority, with web interfaces as a much lower priority.

I agree. The Apple Card has the same impact on lock-in as Apple Watch. Neither is a requirement, and both have plenty of non-Apple counterparts you can move to if you want to leave Apple behind.

It’s the ecosystem itself that keeps you around, not any one piece of it.

Steve Moser, MacRumors:

According to code strings found in macOS Catalina, Apple will apparently allow videos to be downloaded for offline viewing, but with limitations on the total number of downloads, downloads per show or movie, or the total number of times a show or movie can be downloaded. For example, if a user tries to download the same video on multiple devices, the Apple TV app will inform them that “To download this episode of ‘The Morning Show’, delete it from another device and try again,” for example.

Glad to see that Apple TV+ will (apparently) allow downloads, just like Amazon Video and Netflix. When I travel, I always download videos for later consumption, since there are times when internet access is either spotty or limited in some way.

Variety:

Apple Music today launched the “Shazam Discovery Top 50,” a weekly, global ranking of 50 artists that it describes as “on the move and trending” — in other words, new and emerging artists.

While the company wouldn’t say much specifically about how the chart is tabulated, it uses “Shazam’s proprietary algorithms [to offer] a unique predictive view on rising artists and reacting tracks to Apple Music subscribers.” With 20 million Shazams each day and over 1 billion downloads of its app, that’s a fairly significant test audience.

It’s hard for the average person to “discover” new artists and music but this might help. The downside is it seems to be fairly limited, genre-wise.

Digital DJ Tips:

This past week, the first ever live DJ set from space took place. Using an iPad with djay Pro, European astronaut Luca Parmitano’s performance was beamed from the International Space Station straight to a cruise ship packed with ravers. Floating inside one of the ISS’s rooms, DJ Luca dropped a mix of EDM, hardstyle and uplifting (ahem) trance to an enthusiastic audience watching him from massive LED walls back on Earth.

This is amazing. Tiny detail I love is the velcro on the back of the iPad that Luca uses to keep his iPad from floating away.

Apple:

Apple Card, a new kind of credit card created by Apple and designed to help customers lead a healthier financial life, is available in the US starting today. Customers can apply for Apple Card through the Wallet app on iPhone in minutes and start using it right away with Apple Pay in stores, in apps and on websites. Built on simplicity, transparency and privacy, Apple Card has no fees, encourages customers to pay less interest, offers an easy-to-understand view of spending and provides a new level of privacy and security. This launch follows the Apple Card preview earlier this month, during which a limited number of customers were invited to apply early.

For qualifying customers, subject to credit approval.

In the footnotes:

Apple Pay is coming soon to Uber services like Uber Cash, Scheduled Rides and JUMP.

If you are in the US and have been spamming your Wallet app to no avail, try again now.

• Launch the Wallet app
• Tap the + in the upper right corner
• Tap the Continue button on the bottom of the Apple Pay page
• You should see an Apple Card item. Tap it. Off to the races.

I think Goldman Sachs Bank is going to be incredibly busy today.

This is both cool and significant. Start by watching the video in the embedded tweet:

Entering a new dimension: activating AR tattoo art🌀

Created with @eyejackapp by Sutu @thenawlz pic.twitter.com/HqF1vQJ1WW

— Nikita S (@singareddynm) August 18, 2019

These were created on a Mac using an app called EyeJack Creator. Imagine the possibilities.

On the art side, there are paths for animation and storytelling. And there is also the possibility of embedding hidden copyright information tied to a specific design.

There is also the possibility of tying hidden messages to a temporary tattoo, something akin to steganography. Very interesting.

Use Home Sharing on your Mac to share your media with your home, dorm, or office? Never heard of Home Sharing?

Either way, take a read of the linked article. Kirk McElhearn walks through the new Home Sharing interface coming with macOS Catalina.