Here’s a little experiment for you. Bring up the search field on your iPhone and type in a flight number—for example, WW126. Near the top of the results will be an option to bring up flight status. Tap that and you’ll get a nice little map of the flight as well some other info, like destination, duration, and so on.
Now, try asking Siri for the status of the same flight. I’ll wait.
Right. You’ll notice that Siri doesn’t seem to know anything about flight status, and instead goes straight to a web search.
There are two sides to this coin. On the one side, it’s infuriating when something that should clearly work a certain way refuses to work that way. You can see that your iPhone “knows” about flight status, and it seems obvious that Siri should, at the very least, be able to pass through a request to the underlying interface.
On the other side, I’m betting that the reason Siri is unable to do something that seems, on the surface, such a simple task, is missing wiring. Siri remains a constantly evolving work-in-progress. And, it seems, at least on the surface, that the team that enabled the Springboard search feature is not in the same planning groove as the Siri team.
iOS is a complex beast. Siri is a complex beast. The question to me: Is there a designer at the top building a model that feeds both of these teams? Or is it more likely that the flight status search feature was born inside the Springboard search team, never rising high enough in the planning process in a way that fed the Siri team.
I don’t think Siri not being nimble with flight status is a big deal. But I do think it might be a sign of a larger issue.
Jean-Louis Gassée, MondayNote, on trying to find a way to sell the Mac in the dark days of 1985, with Steve Jobs recently gone:
Position the Mac as a Graphics Based Business System (GBBS). The Business System part was adman puffery meant to project gravitas, but the reference to graphics made unarguable sense: The Mac’s Graphical User Interface (GUI) was clearly a distinguishing factor at the time.
Everyone in the room loved the idea. Rather than take on the whole market, Apple would define and dominate a niche. As the Valley marketing sage put it (quoting Julius Caesar), better to be the chief of a small village in the Alps than second-in-command in Rome.
And:
Thanks to Jobs’ vision and powers of seduction, a couple of “serious developers”, Adobe and Aldus, helped transform the GBBS air guitar into a reality. Adobe contributed the PostScript software engine for the LaserWriter’s breakthrough typography and graphics. Aldus came up with the PageMaker program that made exemplary use of the Mac + LaserWriter combo. Aldus Chairman Paul Brainerd coined the term Desktop Publishing (DTP), a phrase that replaced the GBBS straw man and remains to this day. The Mac became #1 in the DTP village.
In the rest of this smart, well-written piece, Jean-Louis asks, and attempts to answer the question, “Is there an Alpine hamlet that the HomePod can claim as its own?”
One major difference between the original Mac and HomePod (besides the obvious ones) is that the original Mac had no ecosystem, no huge, dependable, cash-abundant audience on which to draw. With an iPhone/Apple Music-backed ecosystem, Apple has the luxury of a steady stream of HomePod early adopters to keep the cash flowing and feedback coming while the product evolves.
I’ve long recommended creating a bootable installer drive—on an external hard drive, thumb drive, or USB stick—for the version of macOS you’re running on your Mac.1 It’s great for installing the OS on multiple Macs, because you don’t have to download the ~5GB installer onto each computer, and it serves as a handy emergency disk if your Mac is experiencing problems. 2 Here’s this year’s version, for both macOS High Sierra (10.13) and macOS Sierra (10.12), of my annual how-to guide.
Developers weren’t given access to make native apps until the iPhone’s second year. Before the native development kit was ready, Apple tried to pass off web apps as a “sweet solution” for third-party apps, but nobody was fooled.
Apple wasn’t using web apps for their own built-in iPhone apps — they were using native code and frameworks to make real apps. Developers like me did our best with web apps, but they sucked. We simply couldn’t make great apps without access to the real frameworks.
And:
Developing Apple Watch apps is extremely frustrating and limited for one big reason: unlike on iOS, Apple doesn’t give app developers access to the same watchOS frameworks that they use on Apple Watch.
Instead, we’re only allowed to use WatchKit, a baby UI framework that would’ve seemed rudimentary to developers even in the 1990s. But unlike the iPhone’s web apps, WatchKit doesn’t appear to be a stopgap — it seems to be Apple’s long-term solution to third-party app development on the Apple Watch.
I’ve long given up on using any third-party apps on my Apple Watch, and I am so much happier for it. A year or two ago I would have been “Hell yeah”-ing this piece by Arment, but at this point I half feel like Apple should just get rid of third-party WatchOS apps and be done with it.
The one type app I think most people want is the one type of app Apple is never going to allow: custom watch faces. After that, the only thing good with Apple Watch is receiving (and responding to) notifications and fitness tracking.
All of this rings true to me. If you took all third party apps away and left me with notifications, fitness tracking, and complications that let me peer into that data, I might not even notice.
But if you opened the SDK to allow developers to build custom watch faces? I think we’d see some innovation or, at the very least, I’d have something closer to my dream watch.
My current setup is the most complication-rich of the watch faces, one that shows me:
day/date
current time
the next upcoming calendar event
outside temperature
battery level
music
Ideally, I’d love to add the Activities complication to that watch face. But I’d have to get rid of something first. But if someone could build a sliding complication that allowed me to swipe to the side to access additional complications, well I’d be all set.
And that’s just one tiny idea. If Apple opened up WatchKit, gave developers more to work with, I suspect we’d see some really great usable stuff emerge.
The streaming service has given a straight-to-series order to a psychological thriller series from writer Tony Basgallop that Shyamalan will executive produce. Plot details for the series are being kept under wraps. The half-hour series has received a 10-episode order, with Shyamalan also set to direct the first episode.
To me, M. Night Shyamalan is exasperating. I am a huge fan of The Sixth Sense, and the connected series, Unbreakable, Split, and the upcoming Glass. But interspersed throughout those movies is a series of projects that just left me cold. And there were a lot of them.
Shyamalan’s most recent TV effort was Wayward Pines, well received, but it ultimately ended after two seasons.
I decided to dig into the many ways you can set timed alerts on your Apple devices and how the alert systems vary from device to device. It is, you will not be surprised to learn, a mess.
This is a fascinating read, everything you’d ever want to know about timers, reminders, and alarms, and the way they are shared amongst the varied OSes in the Apple ecosystem.
But to me, this is emblematic of many other ecosystem elements. As you read through this, think about photos, music, your documents, even Siri access.
At the same time, to be fair, realize that we are at HomePodOS version 1.0. Surely the HomePod sharing model will evolve significantly over time.
When Elon Musk’s SpaceX heaved two communications satellites aloft last week, he joined a space race that’s foiled plenty of other dreamers.
Billions of dollars have vanished in the quest to provide internet service from low-earth orbit. Globalstar Inc. and Iridium Communications Inc. crashed into bankruptcy but are still at it, while another effort folded despite backing from Bill Gates, Boeing Co. and others.
But the failure of others has never stopped Musk. Especially where space is concerned.
Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Greg Wyler’s OneWeb, Boeing, and Canada’s Telesat are among the companies that have asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to offer broadband service using satellites.
This is a race. And I believe someone in this pack might ultimately succeed.
And if that does happen, will it lower the cost of internet access? Will it provide broadband everywhere, an alternative to cell carriers? Will cord-cutting become more practical?
How does the FCC feel about all this?
SpaceX’s plan calls for 4,425 satellites but it has also applied for another 7,518. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has given his backing to the proposal, making it likely to win the agency’s clearance to provide broadband via low-earth orbit.
Ring doorbells are already being used by 2 million customers. Its improbable success comes five years after its founder, serial entrepreneur Jamie Siminoff, was rejected on the TV show “Shark Tank.”
Rejected isn’t quite right. He got offers, just none that made sense to him.
But the company proved there was demand for video-enabled doorbells, which enable users to see outside their homes via smartphone or computer. The technology provides a sense of security and a salve for one of the most nagging problems in the e-commerce era: package thieves.
There’s a certain irony there. Seems to me, the biggest victim of package thieves is Amazon, who ponys up a replacement when its packages don’t make it into customer hands.
Ring is also an excellent complement to Amazon Key, the program that allows package delivery services access to your house to leave a package under your lock and key.
One last thought on this. I’ve long thought one critical piece of the Amazon Echo ecosystem (echosystem?) that was missing was an Alexa phone. Amazon’s Fire Phone was a product ahead of its time. It was a commercial failure.
Alexa runs as a second class citizen on iOS and Android. There, but without that frictionless access to the hardware that makes Siri and Google person so easy to summon. I think Alexa is the demand card that Amazon’s phone was missing the first time around. If an Alexa-phone hit the market now, I think it’d be a very different story.
If you’re an Apple user who’s interested in joining the smart home revolution—or adding even more smarts to your existing setup—this book is the ideal guide.
I had a look through this book this morning. HomeKit isn’t as complicated as I thought it was after reading a few sections of the book.
To see if you’re bending correctly, try a simple experiment.
“Stand up and put your hands on your waist,” says Jean Couch, who has been helping people get out of back pain for 25 years at her studio in Palo Alto, Calif.
“Now imagine I’ve dropped a feather in front of your feet and asked to pick it up,” Couch says. “Usually everybody immediately moves their heads and looks down.”
That little look down bends your spine and triggers your stomach to do a little crunch. “You’ve already started to bend incorrectly — at your waist,” Couch says. “Almost everyone in the U.S. bends at the stomach.”
As we (I) get older, we can have a significant loss of flexibility. My wife is a long time yoga practitioner and has been teaching me some small movements I can do to increase strength and flexibility and this was a big help.
Even though black holes excite the imagination like few other concepts in science, the truth is that no astronomer has actually seen one. We’ve “heard” them, so to speak, as scientists have recorded the gravitational waves (literal ripples in spacetime) emanating from black holes that collided with one another billions of years ago.
But any photo you’ve seen of a dark mass warping spacetime … well, that’s just an illustration.
This soon may change. An audacious global project called the Event Horizon Telescope is currently working to piece together an image of a black hole for the first time. And if it does, it will be a remarkable accomplishment. Because as massive black holes are, they’re actually incredibly hard to see up close.
That big black circle we often see in movies and TV isn’t real but some of the images in this post are equally amazing.
Today, the American LED makers are forgotten. “The phenomenon of the American digital watch is quite unique in the history of watchmaking,” writes watch expert Lucien Trueb, in his exhaustive 2013 book about electronic watches, “Electrifying the Wristwatch” . “Hardly anybody remembers the short-lived [American] watch ‘adventure.’ Their once promising diversification into the watch business ended as a flop, which nobody really wants to remember.”
The world’s first digital watch was made in America: Pulsar should be remembered for that, if nothing else. But the American LED watch adventure, which lasted from 1972 to 1981, is actually a whale of a watch tale that deserves its place in watch history.
I’m old enough to remember lusting after an LED watch when I was a kid. They seemed so cool and space age-y. I had to “settle” for an old Timex my dad gave me that turned out to be my most valued possession for years – just because dad gave it to me.
An important lesson I’ve learned as CEO of Marketcircle is that as a business, it’s critical to evolve or you get left behind. In order for us to stay competitive in our market, to continue innovating, and to provide you with excellent products and services, we have to focus on Cloud. With 87% of our revenue coming from Cloud, it doesn’t make sense to continue working on a platform that splits our resources and is decreasing in demand. If we continue to support both platforms, both will suffer.
The company announced end of life for Daylite Server and Billings Pro Server, but it is a wise decision considering where things are going, and have been going for many years. It just makes no sense to try to keep both products going.
Cellebrite, a Petah Tikva, Israel-based vendor that’s become the U.S. government’s company of choice when it comes to unlocking mobile devices, is this month telling customers its engineers currently have the ability to get around the security of devices running iOS 11. That includes the iPhone X, a model that Forbes has learned was successfully raided for data by the Department for Homeland Security back in November 2017, most likely with Cellebrite technology.
Devices supported for Advanced Unlocking and Extraction Services include:
Apple iOS devices and operating systems, including iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, iPad Pro and iPod touch, running iOS 5 to iOS 11
Google Android devices, including Samsung Galaxy and Galaxy Note devices; and other popular devices from Alcatel, Google Nexus, HTC, Huawei, LG, Motorola, ZTE, and more.
If true, that Forbes headline seems a fair statement.
Apple is launching a group of health clinics called AC Wellness for its own employees and their families this spring, according to several sources familiar with the company’s plans.
The company quietly published a website, acwellness.com, with more details about its initiative and a careers page listing jobs including primary care doctor, exercise coach, and care navigator, as well as a phlebotomist to administer lab tests on-site.
And:
Sources said that it started notifying third-party vendors about the shift to its own network of health clinics this week.
And:
Sources said the company will leverage its medical clinics as a way to test out its growing range of health services and products, which it is starting to roll out to consumers at large.
Will Apple roll out health clinics to serve consumers, rather than just employees? Not clear, but certainly seems a possibility.
Digging through the AC Wellness site, I found a corporate address, which is located adjacent to an Apple Fitness Center. Via Google Maps, here’s a pic of the sign at the AC Wellness address:
Apple Inc. is preparing to release a trio of new smartphones later this year: the largest iPhone ever, an upgraded handset the same size as the current iPhone X and a less expensive model with some of the flagship phone’s key features.
And:
With a screen close to 6.5 inches, Apple’s big new handset will be one of the largest mainstream smartphones on the market. While the body of the phone will be about the same size as the iPhone 8 Plus, the screen will be about an inch larger thanks to the edge-to-edge design used in the iPhone X. (Apple is unlikely to refer to the phone as a phablet, a term popularized by Samsung.)
I remember agonizing over the huge size of the iPhone 6 Plus, worrying about it fitting in my pockets, being too large for my hands. I switched and have never looked back. I no longer think of the Plus form factor as large. To me, it has become the new normal.
The thought of the same footprint, but with a nicer display than my 8 Plus, and more pixels, well that’s irresistible. The obvious hitch will be the price-tag.
A 256GB iPhone X is priced at $1,149. I can only imagine that a 256GB iPhone X Plus will be about $100 more (the difference in price between the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus), or $1,249. How far can Apple push that price ceiling?
Josh Centers has looked at all of the options we have to cut the cord from traditional cable and satellite TV companies, so I had him on the show to talk about what he likes and doesn’t like about the choices. We talk about Hulu, Direct TV, YouTube TV, and others as we try to find a solution.
Brought to you by:
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Don’t know if it’s the best Beatles cover ever, but given that this is two people busking in the subway, that’s a helluva performance. Sweet, sweet harmonies.
One of Samsung’s messages with the new Galaxy S9 is that it’s “Built for the Way We Communicate Today.” And while that’s a laudable goal, one of the key features behind that message — AR Emoji — doesn’t feel like it connects with the way anyone communicates now, or will want to in the future. At least I hope not.
And:
from our brief testing, they’re a plane crash right into the depths of the Uncanny Valley. They’re not abstract enough to be cute, yet not realistic enough to be authentic.
Great turn of phrase (Here’s a link to the uncanny valley Wikipedia page). Seems to me I’ve seen this animated emoji concept somewhere before.
All too often, I give up trying to tap my way through Settings and instead pull down to reveal the Search field, before remembering that searches in Settings often fail.
And:
It’s worse even than the System Preferences app in macOS, which at least shows all preference panes without the need to scroll. In fact, System Preferences points to the simple way Apple could rearrange the Settings app to make it easier to navigate.
Did you know that when System Preferences is the frontmost app on the Mac, you can go to the menu bar and choose View > Organize Alphabetically? And it does!
This is a growing pains problem. An interface approach that works well when something is small falls apart when the set of elements being organized grows too big. At some point, a second (and even third) layer of organization is required. And it does not help when all the various organizational methods are wildly inconsistent.
Adam suggests offering a second level “view by” scheme that supports an alphabetical sort of settings. I think this is a step in the right direction, but I’d take this one step further.
I’d suggest that Apple take a look at every single sorting and searching problem in macOS and iOS and consider re-rolling all of them to make them consistent. The end result would have the user learn one basic approach and instantly translate that knowledge throughout the ecosystem.
[Hulu] lost $920 million in 2017, according to BTIG, which projects that the business will lose $1.67 billion this year. Hulu is also facing more intense competition than ever as its rivals disrupt the entertainment industry by handing out big checks. In recent months, Netflix has signed the producers Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy to nine-figure deals; Amazon has pledged more than $200 million toward a “Lord of the Rings” series; and Apple, a newcomer in the field, is shelling out hundreds of millions to create original programming of its own.
This is a great article, interesting on several fronts. Consider their complex ownership:
The Walt Disney Company (30 percent), 21st Century Fox (30 percent), Comcast (30 percent) and Time Warner (10 percent). If Disney’s pending $52.4 billion acquisition of most of 21st Century Fox wins governmental approval, as is expected, Disney will own 60 percent of Hulu.
And:
The Disney-Fox deal raises the question of what will happen to Hulu, given that Disney is already developing two streaming services. Another potential issue is whether or not two of Hulu’s owners — Disney, which owns ABC, and Comcast, which owns NBC Universal — will be able to play nicely with each other after they become owners with uneven stakes in the platform.
The article also takes you behind the scenes on a series pitch, where Hulu outbid all comers for the rights to produce the upcoming series “The Looming Tower”.
The whole thing is well written and fascinating. Oddly, the article was also posted on CNBC, if you don’t have access to the New York Times.
“We support marriage equality and believe all Australians deserve the freedom to marry the person they love, and to have their relationships recognised with the same dignity and legal protections as their neighbours, friends, and family.”
Over the weekend, Apple Australia released four new iPhone X ads, all reemphasizing that support. Each video is backed by Australian singer/songwriter Courtney Barnett, who recorded a cover of the INXS classic Never Tear Us Apart specifically for the ads.
