Wi-Fi Now: >To be fair, Wi-Fi has has many ‘founding parents’ – such as Vic Hayes and even Hollywood bombshell Hedy Lamarr. While the technical birthplace of Wi-Fi could reasonably be said to be The Netherlands – where most of the initial work on the 802.11 standards took place with NCR – it would also be fair to say that the commercial birth of Wi-Fi harks back to a meeting at Apple Computer in Cupertino, California, on April 20, 1998. In today’s digital era, reading blogs such as those about EnableIT offers valuable insights, helping individuals enhance their internet knowledge, improve connectivity, and navigate the online world with ease and confidence.

>The world’s first Wi-Fi-enabled laptop was launched by Apple at MacWorld in New York City on July 21, 1999. Jobs demonstrated wireless Internet by walking about on stage with the laptop in his hand and – like a magician – passing the iBook through a hula hoop while the crowd cheered.

>And the rest – as they say – is history.

I was at that launch. The company I was working for at the time really wanted to have wifi-enabled laptops but the cost for cards and access points was prohibitively expensive – wifi wasn’t something for consumers at the time. I came back from Macworld Expo and told them they should invest in “this new Apple stuff. It’s going to blow up the world of laptops and internet access”. Of course, they ignored me.

The above story links to a (poorly written but still interesting) PDF written by Cees Links. The Apple segment begins on page 105.

Ars Technica:

Apple removed thousands of gambling apps from China’s App Store after the company came under fire from state-run media. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, the tech giant removed as many as 25,000 illegal gambling apps, many of which were disguised as official lottery apps, from China’s App Store after China Central Television criticized the company for not doing more to catch and remove banned content.

“Gambling apps are illegal and not allowed on the App Store in China,” Apple said in an emailed statement to The Wall Street Journal, confirmed by Safebettingsites.com. Online casinos like LIMO55 offer a convenient and secure platform where everyone can enjoy playing their favorite casino games.

“We have already removed many apps and developers for trying to distribute illegal gambling apps on our App Store, and we are vigilant in our efforts to find these and stop them from being on the App Store.

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While Apple occasionally cleans up its App Stores to remove spam apps and content, this recent situation shows another way that the company has bent to the rules of the Chinese government.

How corporations deal with governments has always fascinated me, even more so when the corporation’s goals and values are significantly different than the country’s.

Feh.

Hate to hear this. Had high hopes that the MacBook keyboard issues were behind us. I will add that my son’s machine (a 2017 model purchased earlier this year) has the same issue.

Check out the article URL, a nice little side comment in those last 13 characters.

One final note: Check out this video showing a warranty-voiding fix to the spacebar problem. Fascinating, but definitely not something you want to try at home.

Rene Ritchie, iMore:

Since iPhone 5, Apple has announced every new iPhone during a special event held the first or second Tuesday or Wednesday of September.

Rene lays out the dates of Apple’s September events since 2013 and makes his best guess:

It’s likely we’ll see this year’s event on or around Wednesday, September 12.

And this from John Gruber:

I have no inside information on this, but September 12 is definitely my guess, for all the same reasons Ritchie mentions. Since moving iPhone intro events to September in 2012 with the iPhone 5, they’ve had three events on Tuesdays and three on Wednesdays. For whatever reason, I don’t think they like Thursdays.

I do love this game, for some reason. Part of it, for me, is that this kind of guessing hurts no one and does stoke the embers for the event without revealing something that would diminish the event.

September 12th sounds good to me.

Josh Centers, TidBITS:

We’ve been trying to incorporate screencasts into more of our articles here at TidBITS—there are times when a short video conveys some point better than any number of screenshots. As far as tools go, ScreenFlow is the gold standard, but QuickTime Player can record screen actions and iMovie is a decent video editor. And both come with all Macs for free, so that’s where we’re starting.

But I recently stumbled across an infuriating problem: no matter what I did with my original screen recordings, I couldn’t use File > Share > File in iMovie to save a video file at a resolution higher than 720p.

Solid detective work by Josh Centers, as he works out a kludge to get a better iMovie resolution. But even better, his bit of hackery stuck and he now has reset the default iMovie resolution to something much more usable.

Even if you don’t use iMovie, you never know when the need will arise. Take a read through this, just to get a sense of the technique.

And:

I don’t want to sound ungrateful, since iMovie is an impressive tool to be bundled with the Mac for free, but hacks like this shouldn’t be necessary.

Yup.

Here’s a translation of the body of the article, from the Dutch, courtesy of Google Translate:

An iPad has exploded in the Amsterdam Apple store. Three employees were affected by their airways. The store has been evacuated.

Cause is probably a leaking battery. The fire brigade told the local broadcaster AT5.

Employees of the store have immediately placed the iPad in a container with sand. The employees who suffered from the airways were checked by the ambulance staff. The Apple Store, which is located at Leidseplein, has been aired by the fire department.

As far as I can tell, this story is the source of all the other coverage I’ve encountered. As always, if possible, I like to go to the source and read these sorts of things for myself.

As to the word explodes in the title and story, that’s the translation direct from Google. Was there an actual explosion? Was this more of a sizzle and pop than a boom or bang? Hard to say. Grain of salt.

Dan Moren, writing for Macworld, digs into the Apple TV’s TV app, the Movies Anywhere service, and Apple’s Apple Books rewrite.

The whole piece is worth reading, but a few nuggets:

The big question mark hanging over it all is what exactly will happen when Apple’s own video streaming service launches. Will it take over the [TV] app, pushing the rest of your content aside? Or will it be content to share a place on equal footing with the other partners? For customers’ sake, I certainly hope for the latter.

I use my Apple TV all the time, but never use the TV app, mostly because of the lack of Netflix integration. If Apple can get Netflix buy-in, and avoid overwhelming the TV app when they fold in their own Apple-branded content, the TV app will become my first stop when I switch to my Apple TV.

At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled a major overhaul to its ebook platform, including a graphical update to the reading apps, a better store experience, and reading features that take aim at Amazon’s own Goodreads service.

That’s good because Amazon does continue to dominate the market and has little in the way of competition, and Apple is one of the few companies big enough to seriously challenge it. The real question is if Apple can do anything compelling enough to draw market share from Amazon.

I’ve long been an Amazon Kindle reader. I buy all my books from the Kindle store, do most of my reading on my iPad. But this new version of Apple Books has my attention. A central issue for me is the ability to share books with my family, something Amazon only recent started offering. Apple’s deal is much simpler, is already in place for me, and the Apple deal has none of Amazon’s limits.

BBC:

A barefoot farmer is making his way through a forest. Quiet drops of rain tumble steadily through the night, picked out in the light from his torch. The rusty machete he holds isn’t for cutting down vines or chopping away stubborn branches – it is a defence against thieves.

Lots of other men – farmers like him – are out in the rain, patrolling the forest. For the past three months, they have left their homes every night and made the long journey into the plantations to protect their crop. But this is not an illegal coca plantation, or anything like it. In fact, these farmers are growing a crop whose name is a byword for something boring.

The men need weapons to guard against robbers who roam the countryside looking for one thing – Madagascan vanilla.

As an amateur cook, I’ve had chef friends say, “You must use real vanilla!” I had no idea it would make that much of a difference but it really does. That being said, the price of real vanilla has skyrocketed in the past few years.

Smithsonian Magazine:

“I have obtained one of the finest and least expected results—Spectra of the stars!—and beautiful spectra with colors and magnificent lines. Just one more step and the chemical composition of the universe will be revealed,” wrote astrophysicist Pierre Jules César Janssen to his wife from an observatory in Italy in December 1862. Armed with the latest technology of the day and observations made by other Western astrophysicists, Janssen was determined to pry open the secrets of the galaxy.

On August 18, 1868, Janssen managed to do just that. He became the first person to observe helium, an element never before seen on Earth, in the solar spectrum. At the time, though, Janssen didn’t know what he’d seen—just that it was something new.

The mid-1800s was an exciting time to peer at the heavens.

I love these stories from the “Age of Discovery” when it seemed that scientists, amateur or otherwise, were discovering things we now take for granted almost every day.

Paul Guyot:

So, this guy is walking down the street. A rumpled, stained, fast food uniform. Obviously just off a long day of serving ungrateful, hurried guests. But he knows self-care. He’s got himself an ice cream cone.

And he is in a state of nirvana. He’s enjoying this (I’m sure well deserved) ice cream cone like it’s the last one he’s ever gonna have. He is focused. No one has ever been this focused, except maybe Carlos Hathcock.

His focus is only broken by the sound of a bus… I watch him look, and see the realization come over his face – this bus is where he is headed with his delicious feast. And that there is no way he gets there before it leaves… unless he runs.

Twitter is often a dumpster fire, seemingly run by people who have no clue about business in general and Twitter specifically. Many people, here and elsewhere, dismiss Twitter and whatever value it may have. That’s completely understandable.

But sometimes (yes – far too rarely), Twitter brings me a great deal of joy. This thread is an example of that. Thanks to my friend Jared Earle for pointing me to it.

Marc Rooding, Medium:

During that night, my girlfriend and I were fast asleep, when at 03:45 the doorbell rang. We looked at each other dazed. I got out of bed and attempted to journey downstairs in my boxers when the doorbell rang again. Before opening the door I went into the living room to gaze out of the window. A police car with 2 policemen was standing in front of our house. I opened the door and was welcomed with the question whether I owned a BMW with a specific license plate. They said that a car burglary had taken place.

Read the story. Short version, the thieves tried a new approach that might signal a new wave of auto theft techniques. If nothing else, this will give you something to be aware of, if your car is ever broken into, but nothing appears to be taken.

Michael Tsai collected a variety of comments and links about the #BreakingMyTwitter changes Twitter just made that broke 3rd party Twitter clients. There’s just a ton of great reading here.

I would start with this blog post from Twitter’s own Ron Johnson trying to explain Twitter’s intentions.

One take missing from Michael’s collection is this post from John Gruber, which specifically addresses his preference for his 3rd party client of choice, Tweetbot (which I use as well).

One thing that struck me is this bit, from the end of John’s post:

When Rob Johnson shared his email this morning about Twitter and third-party clients, he did so by tweeting two screenshots of the message. Those screenshots show he uses a third-party email client on his iPhone. So my simple argument to Johnson is this: I prefer a third-party Twitter client for the same reason you prefer a third-party iOS email client. One size doesn’t fit all.

Exactly.

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

I went to a wedding in London over the summer, and as you might expect at an event full of techy people, I ended up with hundreds of photos of the event from numerous sources—at least six. I imported them all into my Photos library and then discovered that they were all mixed up—the bride walking down the aisle, immediately followed by dancing at the reception, followed by the exchanging of vows.

This happens to me every time I get photos from other folks and try to mix them with my own photos of the same event. This is especially true when I travel with a group, and we each have our own view of the same series of locations.

The issue, for the most part, is the time stamps and device clocks:

Most cameras embed time data on every file they take, which is great, but whenever I try to mix photos from multiple sources in one place, I end up discovering all the ways that the clocks don’t match. For some of them, the clock is right but the time zone is wrong. For others (especially non-cellular devices that rely on a human to set their clock correctly) there are a few minutes of drift. For still others, there’s a time but not a time zone embedded.

Though this is less and less an issue as more and more photos are taken with clocks set by servers, there are still time zone issues, as well as photos taken using regular cameras.

Take the time to make your way through Jason’s post. If nothing else, I appreciate the walkthrough of smart albums and what they can do for you. Great stuff.

If you haven’t heard about this story, here’s yesterday’s Loop post. Shocking stuff.

Apple’s reassuring response:

An Apple spokesman said the company’s information security personnel “discovered the unauthorized access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement” without commenting further on the specifics of the case.

“We … want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised,” the spokesman said.

That last is so good to know.

If you are considering a Verizon unlimited plan, here’s the link to that free six months of Apple Music page.

6 months times $9.99 is $59.94. Worth it if you’re going that direction anyway. And the way I read it, you get the free 6 months even if you already have an unlimited plan.

Andrew O’Hara, Apple Insider:

Google updated help center documentation Thursday to clarify its location data collection policies, changes made in light of recent revelations that the firm’s apps and website continue to harvest user information even when a global “Location History” setting is disabled.

Here’s a link to the updated Google help page. Read it for yourself.

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.

Here’s a link to the song Everytime (A Cappella) for you to try for yourself.

I clicked the link on my Mac, logged in to the page that appeared, and was able to listen to the song in my browser, without jumping to iTunes.

According to the Reddit comments, this seems to have appeared sometime after WWDC. It also appears that there is a 3rd party API so people can build their own web-based music players. The API might still be in beta, though I tested the above link on the public release of High Sierra.

Interesting.

UPDATE: Here’s a post from Kirk McElhearn about all this from back in June, when it first became available.

Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:

The new plans include 100GB storage for $1.99 a month, 200GB for $2.99 a month, and 2TB for $9.99 a month (down from $19.99). The free 15GB for non-paying users remains. There’s also a new family option for divvying up a single storage plan amongst up to five members.

And Apple:

Apple’s iCloud monthly storage plans aren’t so different: they start with 5GB free storage for non-paying users, then offer 50GB for $0.99, 200GB for $2.99, and 2TB for $9.99.

To me, 5GB might as well be zero. The smallest configuration for Apple’s most popular phone, the iPhone X, is 64GB. What does that 5GB offer for a 64GB phone? It seems paltry. To me, this is stingy and bad optics.

At the very least, I think Apple should match Google’s free 15GB and unlimited free photo storage. Even better, raise that bar. As is, this feels like nickel and diming people who are spending as much as $1,000 for a phone.

This is definitely more interesting than useful. Just a historic artifact.

Wow, just wow.

Neil Cybart:

There are three drivers behind Apple’s return to revenue growth:

1. iPhone. The average selling price (ASP) of iPhone is up $100 year-over-year.
2. Services. Apple is seeing strong revenue growth from the App Store, licensing, and AppleCare.
3. Wearables. Apple’s wearables platform is gaining sales momentum as Apple Watch and AirPods go mainstream.

Lots of interesting detail in the article. On that last bullet, I am seeing Apple Watch and AirPods everywhere now.

When I am out running, I see more and more other runners with AirPods in their ears. Mainstream is the right term here.

On a related note, I get why Apple sticks with white as the only color. As was the case when the iPod first started, those white headphones were incredibly important to the branding. I see AirPods white as a similarly important brand marker.

AppleInsider:

The iMac is the machine that famously saved Apple back in 1998 —but it didn’t stop there. Rarely standing still, it has kept at the forefront of Apple design, yet today’s iMac has the same design goals it always has. AppleInsider looks back at the beginning of the line, all the way to today.

I still remember the first time I saw the iMac in real life at the 1998 Macworld Expo in New York City. I watched Apple techs set up several dozen of them in Apple’s booth at the Javits Center ahead of the Steve Jobs Keynote. I will always maintain that the iMac saved Apple. Without it, the company wouldn’t have survived long enough to accomplish all the amazing things it did in the ensuing years and we would all be the poorer for it.

MacRumors:

Ahead of upcoming Twitter changes set to be implemented tomorrow, Tapbots has released an updated version of its Tweetbot app for iOS devices, removing several features that have been present in the app for years.

Timeline streaming over Wi-Fi has been disabled, which means Twitter timelines will refresh every one to two minutes instead of as new tweets come in. We’ve been using the Tweetbot for iOS app in a beta capacity with these changes implemented, and while it’s not a huge change, the delay is noticeable.

These “changes” will also affect those of us who use Twitterrific as well as any other third-party Twitter client. Amazing to watch Twitter slit its own throat almost in real time.

Great marketing campaign. Looking forward to seeing how this plays out when the Browns do win.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

There’s a thriving market for unofficial, aftermarket iPhone parts, and in China, there are entire massive factories that are dedicated to producing these components for repair shops unable to get ahold of parts that have been produced by Apple.

The entire Apple device repair ecosystem is fascinating, complex, and oftentimes confusing to consumers given the disconnect between Apple, Apple Authorized Service Providers, third-party factories, and independent repair shops, so we thought we’d delve into the complicated world of Apple repairs.

Terrific, fascinating read.