Bottom line, use the audio slider in the iPhone and Watch App accessibility settings to change the left/right balance. Good tip from Steffen Reich on iDownloadBlog.

Jeremy Burge:

Why am I now always taking screenshots by accident? Two things:

The volume buttons are directly opposite the Lock button (aka “Sleep/Wake” button), and The combination for screenshot has changed. On phones with a home button, the iOS combination has always been Lock and Home buttons but is now Lock and Volume Up on iPhone X (due to lack of home button)

Trying to hold the phone with a stable grip while pushing the lock button means my thumb is resting on the lock button, and my index finger is on the volume up button.

Design is hard.

The position/function of the external iPhone buttons has evolved over time, and with each new generation, it seems there’s some design compromise that emerges.

In this case, putting buttons on opposite sides of the device mean that pressing one will require an equal and opposite press on the opposing button. And for the iPhone X, this results in a screenshot.

Deadline:

In a competitive situation, Apple has landed the hot TV package See with a straight-to-series order. An epic, world-building drama set in the future, the project is written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight and directed by Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Mockingjay Parts 1 & 2).

And:

This marks the fourth scripted series order for Apple’s recently formed worldwide video programming division under Jamie Erlicht & Zack Van Amburg. See joins a morning-show drama, executive produced by and starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon; Amazing Stories, a reimagining of the anthology from Steven Spielberg and Bryan Fuller; and a Ronald D. Moore space drama. Additionally, the division just ordered its first docuseries, Home.

Here’s a question for you: How soon do you think it will be before Apple gets its first (non-technical) Golden Globes or Emmy nomination?

This year, Netflix got 20 Golden Globe nominations and Amazon and Hulu got 3 each. Will Apple get a nod in the December 2018 nominations? If not, surely we’ll see one by December 2019, no?

A bug report submitted on Open Radar this week reveals a security vulnerability in the current version of macOS High Sierra that allows the App Store menu in System Preferences to be unlocked with any password.

Important to note that this seems to fixed in the latest beta releases, but the current public release still has the vulnerability.

Senator John Thune, a Republican who chairs the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said in a Jan. 9 letter to Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook that “the large volume of consumer criticism leveled against the company in light of its admission suggests that there should have been better transparency.”

It’s going to be a while before this goes away.

The Verge:

Apple discontinued its wired Mac keyboard back in June when it introduced a new version of its wireless Magic Keyboard with a number pad, but a company called Matias is trying to keep the wired version alive with its own replica versions. And this year at CES 2018, the company is looking to one-up Apple’s now discontinued version with a new model that features RGB backlighting.

I’ve always been a fan of Matias keyboards.

This is a great piece of advice from iMore’s Lory Gil. Follow along to make sure you have Apple ID unlock enabled on your Mac. Read through the rest of the post for related how-to info.

Even if you think you’ll never forget your password, this is a smart backup plan.

UPDATE: Looks like this option is moved, or just plain gone from High Sierra. Working with Lory to figure out the new way to do this, check Lory’s post over the next day or so for an update.

UPDATE 2: Turns out the issue is having FileVault enabled, and not specific to High Sierra. If you have FileVault enabled, have a recovery key, you won’t see the checkbox. Yeesh. Bad interface, I think. Better to have the checkbox in both cases, but dim it if FileVault enabled, with some kind of explainer.

OK, this seems really clearcut to me, but judge for yourself.

• Here’s Lana Del Rey’s song Get Free.

• Here’s Radiohead’s Creep.

My take: The chord structure seems identical, the production not so much. But there’s this one moment that really makes the case for me.

• In the Radiohead video, jump to about 39 seconds in and listen to the phrase, “float like a feather”, with that bit of vocalization at the end of the word “feather”.

• Now, in the Lana Del Rey video, jump to about 50 seconds in and listen to the phrase “my modern manifesto”. To me, I hear the same vocalization at the end of the word “manifesto”.

As I said, judge for yourself. But hard for me to believe Creep wasn’t an influence here.

UPDATE: And then there’s this from BBC News (H/T @timbo_baggins), Radiohead deny suing Lana Del Rey:

Radiohead’s publisher, Warner/Chappell, has since issued a statement clarifying its position. “It’s true that we’ve been in discussions since August of last year with Lana Del Rey’s representatives,” it said.

“It’s clear that the verses of Get Free use musical elements found in the verses of Creep and we’ve requested that this be acknowledged in favour of all writers of Creep.

“To set the record straight, no lawsuit has been issued and Radiohead have not said they ‘will only accept 100%’ of the publishing of Get Free.”

Gruber on AMP.

1. Terrific explainer, gets right to the core of the problem (AMP versions of published content end up on Google’s servers, under Google control, and not on publishers’ own servers).

2. What a headline. I had to trim it for our Twitter plugin.

CNBC:

Whirlpool has said Apple Watch wearers will soon be able to remotely control their home appliances.

It would mean smart watch owners could change temperature settings on ovens, delay cycles on washers or check how long is left to run on a dryer.

When I first saw this, I compared it to the ability to use my Apple Watch to quickly bring up my profile/setup on a piece of gym equipment. This takes advantage of the security/identity features of the Apple Watch.

But thinking a bit more, I can see the value in using my Apple Watch to control an appliance. With an oven, you could tap a recipe, have the oven preheat to the right temperature without having to look it up. And checking the time remaining on a washer/dryer cycle, also useful.

Things like this make me realize just how much the Apple Watch is still in its infancy.

Variety:

Music mogul Jimmy Iovine shot down rumors that he plans to exit Apple in August telling Variety that he’s committed to staying on the team and helping the company get music streaming right. “I am almost 65, have been with Apple for four years and in 2 1/2 years the [Apple Music] service has gotten to well over 30 million subscribers and Beats has continued its successful run. But there’s still a lot more we’d like to do. I am committed to doing whatever Eddy [Cue], Tim [Cook] and Apple need me to do, to help wherever and however I can, to take this all the way. I am in the band.”

Good news for Apple. But – what took him so long? The initial Billboard rumor was five days ago.

Push Notifications alert you right away on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad when a new task has been delegated to you and when you’ve been invited to a meeting. As soon as you delegate someone a task in Daylite or invite someone to a meeting, it triggers a notification on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Now you can be confident that you are up to date and can act fast to changes or surprises in your day – even if you don’t have Daylite running.

Marketcircle is one of my favorite companies. They make great products and continue to improve them all the time.

The Guardian:

Internet advertising firms are losing hundreds of millions of dollars following the introduction of a new privacy feature from Apple that prevents users from being tracked around the web.

Advertising technology firm Criteo, one of the largest in the industry, says that the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature for Safari, which holds 15% of the global browser market, is likely to cut its 2018 revenue by more than a fifth compared to projections made before ITP was announced.

Anyone shedding a tear for advertising companies, who for years ignored users’ requests for less intrusive advertising, suddenly crying poverty over Apple’s efforts to offer that protection to their users?

Don’t.

The Globe and Mail:

The evidence for this goes beyond the carping of Luddites. It’s there, cold and hard, in a growing body of research by psychiatrists, neuroscientists, marketers and public health experts. What these people say – and what their research shows – is that smartphones are causing real damage to our minds and relationships, measurable in seconds shaved off the average attention span, reduced brain power, declines in work-life balance and hours less of family time.

They have impaired our ability to remember. They make it more difficult to daydream and think creatively. They make us more vulnerable to anxiety. They make parents ignore their children. And they are addictive, if not in the contested clinical sense then for all intents and purposes.

I don’t buy the full doom and gloom of the article but an overreliance on smartphones in any number of ways is definitely something to be watchful of. I see it in my “new” 12-year-old stepson. He’s “addicted” not to Facebook or Instagram or other social media but he’s very attached to gaming on his iPhone, so much so that it causes significant amounts of family friction.

Ford Motor Co on Tuesday said it will partner with delivery service Postmates Inc as the automaker starts testing ways to transport people, food and packages using its self-driving cars in a U.S. city during the first quarter.

This is an interesting partnership for Ford. I’ve used Postmates a couple of times and it’s an okay service, if you can get a driver.

This looks really cool.

A French prosecutor has launched a preliminary investigation of U.S. tech giant Apple (AAPL.O) over alleged deception and planned obsolescence of its products following a complaint by a consumer organization, a judicial source said on Monday.

I think this will be the first of many such investigations.

“We’ve always been clear that we are open to any opportunity that will help us scale our mission. JP Morgan is our banker, but there is no active engagement to sell,” GoPro said in emailed comments to Reuters.

The more you read the article, the worse it gets. GoPro is in some trouble.

Powermat:

Powermat, the wireless charging technology pioneer, today announced it will become the newest Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) member. Powermat will contribute its technology and expertise to further advance inductive wireless charging capabilities while maintaining backwards compatibility to the existing Qi ecosystem.

“Qi has become the dominant wireless charging standard on the market and the recently launched Apple iPhone lineup is evidence of this success”, said Elad Dubzinski, Powermat CEO.

Ignoring the marketing speak in this press release, the bottom line – that Powermat is going with the Qi standard – is good for consumers. It means a less confusing marketplace.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the Santa Clara Superior Court on Monday, alleges that Google “discriminated against employees for their perceived conservative political views,” as well as due to their “male gender,” and “Caucasian race,” and then “systematically punished” them.

Nathan Gitter:

What determines the color of the home indicator and why it does it behave like this? The answer is surprisingly complex. Let’s take a deep dive and see what we can learn!

This is a wonderfully geeky examination of the iPhone X Home Indicator and how it dynamically changes color. I still hate it though.

Open Culture:

We do not typically remember [Prince] as a jazz pianist. But his facility with jazz earned him the admiration of Miles Davis, who made several efforts to collaborate with the extremely busy pop star. (They performed together only once, it seems, on New Year’s Eve, 1987 at Paisley Park.) Prince’s style, stage show, songwriting, and arranging drew from jazz of all kinds—from zoot suit-era big band to the frenetic movement of hard bop to the classically-inflected show tunes of George Gershwin. Just above see him “casually own” Gershwin’s “Summertime” during a 1990 soundcheck in Osaka, Japan.

I had no idea Prince even played piano, let alone so well. I love this video. The groove is right there, with Prince driving. Super talented.

Dan Moren, Macworld:

Late last year, Apple announced that it would delay the promised release of its HomePod smart speaker to early 2018. It was a disappointment for those customers hoping to score one for the holiday season, but in an interview with Dutch site Bright.nl, Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller said Apple needed “more time to make it right.”

And:

A new report from Canalys says that the smart speaker market is forecast to spike this year, outpacing other technologies like augmented reality and virtual reality. In a rare moment of (for it) transparency, Amazon said it had sold tens of millions of Echo devices during the holidays. (Though many of those sales are likely for the low-cost devices that Apple won’t compete with.)

And:

By all accounts, the version of the HomePod shown to press during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last year was far from a fully functional prototype. Those to whom Apple gave access reportedly got a demonstration of the device’s audio quality, but not much beyond that.

Add to this mix, is a new survey (reported by CNBC) on the impact of smart speakers on people’s smartphone habits:

Two thirds of people who use digital voice assistants like the Amazon Echo or Google Home use their smartphones less often, according to a new survey published by tech consultancy Accenture.

The results suggest that the next big wave of consumer technology will be centered around these digital assistants, and may spell trouble for smartphone makers like Apple and Samsung— who lag behind Amazon and Google in this emerging space.

Here’s a link to that survey. Be sure to click Key Finding #1.

No matter what Apple ships as HomePod 1.0, I suspect there is already a team hard at work on HomePod 2.0, and perhaps on HomePod satellite products. I wouldn’t waste a second worrying about the impact of the smart speaker market on iPhone sales, nor about the first HomePod being the be-all and end-all of smart speakers.

Just as they did with Apple Watch, Apple will revise and tune, learning from every sale, with HomePod eventually landing in a sweet spot that makes money and extends the ecosystem for iPhone, Apple Watch, Apple Music, and Siri.

From the Panic blog, announcing the suspension of the iOS version of the very popular Transmit app:

Transmit iOS made about $35k in revenue in the last year, representing a minuscule fraction of our overall 2017 app revenue. That’s not enough to cover even a half-time developer working on the app. And the app needs full-time work — we’d love to be adding all of the new protocols we added in Transmit 5, as well as some dream features, but the low revenue would render that effort a guaranteed money-loser.

David Sparks from his blog:

Panic has made public statements about how little income they’re making off their pro-level iOS apps, and I really can’t blame them for pulling Transmit if it is losing them money.

What is even more upsetting is that an app of the calibre of Transmit for iOS is a financial failure and none of us are much surprised.

And:

I use Transmit both on my Mac and iOS devices. I don’t recall what I originally paid for Transmit, but I believe it was in the neighborhood of $50. Since then I’ve upgraded twice so let’s say I’ve now given Panic $100 for the privilege of having their app on my Mac.

When I bought Transmit for my iOS devices, I paid $10. That is it. I’ve been using the app for years and all the money Panic ever got out of me was $10, less than I’m going to spend today on lunch.

That’s the issue. Somehow, consoles like Nintendo Switch and the Xbox, as well as the Mac, have avoided the race to the bottom that makes iOS apps want to be free, or dependent on in app purchases. While in-app-purchases make sense for a game, it is a harder sell for a pro-level app.

Panic is pulling Transmit for iOS but keeping the Mac version. Part of the issue is the massive size of the iOS App Store compared to the Mac App Store. The iOS App Store is large enough that it attracts people willing to build something for free just for the experience. And once there’s a free alternative, it becomes exponentially harder to get people to pay for an alternative, even if it is a better experience.

AppleInsider:

Announced at CES on Sunday, the latest iteration of the U system integrates voice control through Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistants. Alexa compatibility arrives in the first quarter as a third-party extension, while Siri and HomeKit will see integration in quarter two.

Moen showed off U in a demonstration, explaining that users simply ask the assistant of their choosing (Alexa on the show floor) to turn on the shower head or set a desired temperature. Water begins to flow from the outlet until a desired temperature is reached, then the system pauses, waiting for a user to enter.

I really like the idea of walking in the bathroom, telling Siri to set the shower temp to my preference, then having Siri let me know when the shower is ready for me.

Luke Kawa, Bloomberg:

In a letter to the smartphone maker dated Jan. 6, activist investor Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System urged Apple to create ways for parents to restrict children’s access to their mobile phones. They also want the company to study the effects of heavy usage on mental health.

“There is a growing body of evidence that, for at least some of the most frequent young users, this may be having unintentional negative consequences,” according to the letter from the investors, who combined own about $2 billion in Apple shares. The “growing societal unease” is “at some point is likely to impact even Apple.”

“Addressing this issue now will enhance long-term value for all shareholders,” the letter said.

Instinctively, it seems clear to me that heavy smartphone usage does have an impact on your mental health. It changes the social equation, moving communication from one-on-one direct contact to abbreviated, interrupting bursts. It also brings in a steady stream of sensationalized news snippets, exposing you to some information that is false.

This is an issue for children and an issue for everyone.

Is this Apple’s issue to fix?

Isaac Lyman:

Meltdown and Spectre are the two latest exploits throwing the tech world for a loop. They have a lot in common with each other; both depend on built-in features of your computer’s processor.

After doing some reading, I think I understand the Meltdown exploit well enough to explain it in layman’s terms.

This is a well-written explainer on what happens with Meltdown. Even I understood it. And I never say this but – read the comments as well.