Electronic Frontier Foundation blog:

Turning off your Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios when you’re not using them is good security practice (not to mention good for your battery usage). When you consider Bluetooth’s known vulnerabilities, it’s especially important to make sure your Bluetooth and Wi-Fi settings are doing what you want them to. The iPhone’s newest operating system, however, makes it harder for users to control these settings.

We’ve discussed the Control Center controls and icons in this Loop post.

In a nutshell, when you tap the WiFi or Bluetooth icons in Control Center, you’ll drop/restore the current connection, but without turning off the respective radio. And that’s the EFF’s complaint.

Instead, what actually happens in iOS 11 when you toggle your quick settings to “off” is that the phone will disconnect from Wi-Fi networks and some devices, but remain on for Apple services. Location Services is still enabled, Apple devices (like Apple Watch and Pencil) stay connected, and services such as Handoff and Instant Hotspot stay on.

All true.

Apple’s UI fails to even attempt to communicate these exceptions to its users.

A small point, but I disagree with this. Once you see the difference between the off icon state and the disconnected state, it’s clear what’s going on. There’s also helper text, like “Disconnected from XXX”, where XXX is your WiFi network name.

The more important issue:

It gets even worse. When you toggle these settings in the Control Center to what is best described as”off-ish,” they don’t stay that way. The Wi-Fi will turn back full-on if you drive or walk to a new location. And both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth will turn back on at 5:00 AM. This is not clearly explained to users, nor left to them to choose, which makes security-aware users vulnerable as well.

The only way to turn off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios is to enable Airplane Mode or navigate into Settings and go to the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth sections.

My two cents? Make the controls default to the safest possible behavior, then expose settings that allow me to go to a more relaxed, less secure state for a specific benefit (battery savings, better communications, etc.)

UPDATE: As pointed out by my unrelated name-sharer and Loop reader Jason Mark, Airplane Mode does not impact the WiFi or Bluetooth radios, as EFF claims. An easy mistake, but worth clarifying. Give this a try on your iOS 11 device.

Dave Hamilton has some good info on how we can expect Sonos to work—or not—with Apple Music.

A pig, a pen, and lifelogging.

Here’s a humorous look at Google’s announcements yesterday.

Pop on some headphones and take some time to explore. This is pretty much every musical genre I’ve ever encountered.

For most (but not all) genres, a click on the name will play a short snippet example. Click on the arrow to the right of the name and you’ll go to that genre’s page, with a pretty significant listing of artists in that space.

Click on an artist, you’ll hear a snippet. Click on the arrow to the right of the artist, you’ll go to that artist’s Spotify page.

From the footnote:

This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1536 genres by Spotify. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.

And (my favorite):

Be calmly aware that this may periodically expand, contract or combust.

I absolutely loved playing with this. Was thinking, I wish Apple Music offered me a system like this for music discovery. I know there are apps that do this, but none has access to my “For You” data. I’d love to spend some time in a tree like this, personalizing and improving my “For You” model so Apple Music actually has a true sense of what I like.

Fantastic collection from 9to5Mac’s Benjamin Mayo. Even if you know every single one of these, this makes an excellent refresher.

Ryan Whitwam, Android Police, quoting the Pixel 2 product page fine print on the Google Store:

Free, unlimited original-quality storage for photos and videos taken with Pixel through the end of 2020, and free, unlimited high-quality storage for photos taken with Pixel afterwards.

There’s been a lot of discussion about exactly what this means. At the very least, if you want to keep taking uncompressed, original-quality pictures past the cutoff date at the end of 2020, you’ll need to start paying for storage. What is unclear is what that means for all the original-quality photos you’ve already placed on the Google Photos servers. Will they continue to be stored for free? Will you have to pay for those, too?

To be clear, I have no issue paying for the storage. Apple, after all, charges for iCloud storage already. Just looking for clarification.

Someone at Google know the details? Please let me know and I’ll update the post.

[H/T Oliver Thomas]

UPDATE: Someone at Google reached out to clarify this issue. As fair a response as I could have hoped for. Here’s the Q&A:

• Me: If I have original-quality photos stored for free, what happens to them once the end of 2020 deadline passes? Do they get deleted? Compressed? Do they stay there but I lose access to them unless I pay for enough storage so they fit?
• Google: They remain at original quality, for free. The change is only for taken photos thereafter.

As I read this, you can take all the original-quality (non-compressed) photos you want and they will always be available, non-compressed. Once the deadline passes, you’ll have a decision to make that only impacts photos taken after the deadline. Those post-deadline pics will be limited by the tier you choose after the deadline. Make sense?

A detailed post from Max Rudberg, lots of pictures, makes me feel more comfortable with the notch itself and how it might look in different situations.

A few highlights:

Regardless of your feelings for the notch, the reality is that to do a near edge-to-edge screen on a phone in 2017; you need to make place for sensors and speaker. The technology to hide them behind the screen simply is not here. We’ve seen different manufacturers choose different solutions to the problem. This is the one Apple chose, so let’s work with what we got.

That last bit is exactly right. These are the cards we’ve been dealt. Let’s work with that.

The familiar 20 pt tall status bar, the same height it’s been since the first iPhone, is now 44 pt tall on iPhone X.

That’s more than twice the height but, of course, it’s now split in two. Not our space to play with, so no reason for developers to worry through what will fit in the so-called horns.

If nothing else, just scroll through all the examples. This is the (at least short term) future.

[H/T Fabrice Dubois]

The iOS design lab will offer technological training and certification to students, faculty, staff and members of the broader community interested in developing apps in Swift, the Apple programming language used to write some of the most successful apps in the App Store. The lab will support educational innovation, career development for students and economic development opportunities for the central Ohio community and the university’s other campus locations.

The Digital Flagship University initiative will launch during the 2017-18 academic year. The iOS design lab will open in a temporary space in 2018, moving to a permanent location in 2019. Students will begin training in Swift coding in spring semester 2018.

Sounds like a great program for the school and Apple.

Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service — a smart assistant for customer representatives to parse and get better insights from their interactions with users, as well as automate some of the interactions — because the team was (according to a notice on the site) “joining a project that touches the lives of countless people across the world.” TechCrunch has now learned what that project is: the team is joining Apple.

This is great news. As much as Apple touts Siri and how smart it is, I still can’t get it to work reliably.

Mashable:

If you’ve never tried to break up with an iPhone before, I’ll tell you this much: It’s not easy. After a year on iOS following many more on Android, I wanted to prove to myself that I could leave Apple’s “walled garden” without feeling like I’d sacrificed something. In the end, I couldn’t do it, and I feel completely, painfully owned by the richest corporation on planet Earth.

The author may not realize it but this is actually a hilarious whine about just how good and consistent the iOS experience is.

Daniel Jalkut was asking on Twitter about screenshot apps.

Skitch for Mac seems possibly abandoned, and has become very buggy in 10.13. What are folks’ favorite Mac screenshot tools these days?

— Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) October 4, 2017

He got a bunch of responses for many different apps. Macfixer suggested one I hadn’t heard about:

I’ve been using ShotBox recently, it’s totally a “duh, why didn’t I think of that?” kind of app:https://t.co/j3r5Q4lRHQ

— macfixer (@macfixer) October 4, 2017

So I checked it out. The developer, Josh Parnham, says:

After taking a screenshot with the system keyboard shortcuts (⌘⇧3 and ⌘⇧4), a window will pop up allowing you to quickly share, edit or delete that screenshot without needing to hunt around your desktop for it first.

I was sold immediately. I went to the Mac App Store, ready to plop down $5 for the “Delete Screenshot” feature alone. Low and behold, the app is free. On his website, Josh says:

If you enjoy using it please feel free to buy me a coffee! ☕️❤️

I’ve already sent him the $5 AUD.

Kirkville:

I’ve been using Google Maps for years, since before Apple released its own map apps. When Apple Maps was first released, I found it very hard to read; there wasn’t enough contrast between roads and backgrounds, and texts were tiny. That’s improved a bit since the initial release, but not much.

Every now and then I try out Apple Maps, when looking for a certain location or a specific type of business. I tried again recently, to see if Apple had improved things with the releases of iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra.

I can’t disagree. I did the same iOS search for “Pubs near me” in Apple Maps, Waze and Google Maps. Apple Maps found none within two kilometers, Waze found three and Google Maps found all four.

Today, along with a new family of hardware products [link], we’re introducing Google Pixel 2. We want you to be able to ask even more from your phone—so we’re giving you the highest-rated camera ever that helps you take great pictures and interact with the world around you, all-day battery life, and an Assistant that understands you better and helps you get more done.

I’m not sure about Google’s camera claims, but features like Google Lens sound interesting.

Today, we’re welcoming two new products to the Google Home family: Google Home Mini is small and mighty for hands-free help in every room. And Google Home Max is our biggest and best-sounding Google Home ever. They’re both radically helpful, and packed with the power of the Google Assistant, including some brand new features.

I haven’t seen or used either of these products, so I’ll reserve judgement. I have seen and listened to Apple’s HomePod and I know how good it sounds for music. There’s still a lot of questions to be answered with the HomePod, but I think I’ll wait until it’s released.

When it comes to multi-room audio, Sonos is still the gold standard. But the company has lagged behind on the smart speaker revolution, promising only that integration with assistants like Amazon’s Alexa would come in due time.

There is a ton of good news from Sonos today.

The European Commission said on Wednesday it was taking Ireland to the European Court of Justice for its failure to recover up to 13 billion euros ($15.3 billion) of tax due from Apple Inc, a move labeled as “regrettable” by Dublin.

Both Apple and Ireland are appealing the ruling that any money is owed, so this seems a bit heavy-handed by the EU.

Motherboard:

“We might be digging a hole to get at this thing, man,” Joshua Allen told me as we barreled across Nevada’s Black Rock Desert in the back of a covered pickup truck.

Allen and his peers from Oregon State University had just launched their homemade rocket at Big Ass Load Lifting Suckers (BALLS), an annual gathering of rocketeers that showcases the most powerful amateur rockets in the US. It was their first time at the event, held late in September, and they hoped that their two-stage rocket would fly to 100,000 feet, about one-third of the way to space proper. The Oregon State students, many of whom graduated in May, had spent the last year designing, building, and testing the rocket we were hunting from a pickup. Allen estimated that it contained over $20,000 of purchased and donated materials—and after a malfunction during its flight, he wasn’t sure they would recover it in one piece, if at all.

I never played with model rockets as a kid but this would be a “blast” to attend.

PetaPixel:

Hello, photographers. Here’s a giant list of 194 photo editing tools and apps you can use in your photography.

I started this research for my project Photolemur in July 2016. After sharing lists of 104 items and 148 resources, I’ve gathered even more photo editing tools for a new and updated giant list.

This is a great list with a wide variety of free and paid apps.

Nicole Laporte, Fast Company, on GIFs and the Emmys:

Then came the night’s biggest, and most controversial, moment: Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer rolled a faux presidential podium onto the stage to deliver a send-up of his infamous “largest audience” speech he gave the day after President Trump’s inauguration. Immediately, the Giphy crew began to splice the scene into GIF form. Part of Giphy’s genius lies in not posting the obvious clip, so Spicer himself wasn’t of much interest. Rather, they surveyed the sea of shocked and bewildered faces in the audience, looking for gold. They found it in Veep‘s Anna Chlumsky, her entire body contorted into an OMG expression—eyes bulging, neck veins popping—as she craned out of her seat for a better view of the strange performance. Within minutes, the editors had the three-second clip uploaded onto Giphy. It began to trend almost immediately. A week after the show, it’d been viewed more than 13 million times.

This is one corner of the future. Keep your eye on Giphy. I predict big things in their future.

In the meantime, this is a fascinating read, all the way through.

John Voorhees just celebrated a major milestone in his life. He left his full time job as a lawyer to dedicated himself to his indie empire, as a developer, podcaster, and blogger. If you’ve ever had similar thoughts, this is an inspirational read.

One tiny nugget, where John talks about that moment when his app got Federico Viticci’s attention:

As the end of 2014 approached, I made a mad dash to finish Blink. By this point, I had managed to get Federico’s attention when I’d posted a late-night teaser video on Twitter of my URL schemes in action. Five minutes later, he sent me a direct message:

And Federico’s response:

Oh man, wow. Please make this universal and let me in the beta as soon as possible! ❤

@viticci November 5, 2014

This is a wonderful read. I have to say, stories like this make me really glad to be a part of this particular community.

Fitz Tepper, TechCrunch:

Today the MLB announced that the Oakland Athletics are piloting a new NFC ticketing solution which lets fans enter the stadium by tapping their phone (or Apple Watch) to a ticket scanner – just like you’d do to use Apple Pay.

And:

The pilot lasted for a six-game homestand starting Sept. 22nd after iOS 11 launched, and was the first time a professional sports event supported contactless tickets in Apple Wallet.

This is big for Apple Pay, Apple Watch, and Apple Wallet. I’d expect this to roll out to more, if not all teams next season. Just a matter of time before this moves to other sports, as well.

Horace Dediu, Asymco:

The Apple A11 Bionic processor has 4.3 billion transistors, six cores and an Apple custom GPU using a 10nm FinFET technology. Its performance appears to be almost double that of competitors and in some benchmarks exceeds the performance of current laptop PCs.

And:

Apple has come to the point where is dominates the processor space. But they have not stopped at processors. The effort now spans all manners of silicon including controllers for displays, storage, sensors and batteries. The S series in the Apple Watch the haptic T series in the MacBook, the wireless W series in AirPods are ongoing efforts. The GPU was conquered in the past year. Litigation with Qualcomm suggests the communications stack is next.

A name you’ll be hearing more and more of is the person who runs this silicon engineering effort for Apple, Johny Srouji. This is a great read.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Of the 832 individuals surveyed, 28 percent said they plan to purchase iPhone X as their next smartphone. An additional 20 percent of respondents said they intend to buy iPhone 8 Plus, while 17 percent will go for iPhone 8.

Lots of intent numbers to process. Small survey size, but not hard to see this as representative.

Interesting to see how many people have their eye on the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus.

Washington Post:

Laurene Powell Jobs, a billionaire philanthropist, entrepreneur and president of the Emerson Collective, is buying a significant stake in Monumental Sports & Entertainment, a sprawling $2.5 billion complex that includes the NBA Wizards, NHL Capitals and Capital One Arena, people familiar with the deal said.

And:

Through her sizable investment, Powell Jobs instantly commands an influential position in the male-dominated ownership circles of the “Big Four” professional sports leagues. Very few women’s names stand atop the ownership list of the NBA’s 30 franchises: Jeanie Buss of the Los Angeles Lakers, Ann Walton Kroenke of the Denver Nuggets and Gail Miller of the Utah Jazz.

And:

Powell Jobs, 53, is one of the wealthiest women in the world, estimated to be worth about $20 billion. Much of that comes from her stock in Apple, the iconic company co-founded by her late husband Steve Jobs, who died in 2011. She also owns 4 percent of the Walt Disney Company.

This is a big, bold move by Laurene Powell Jobs, a follow-up to her nonprofit’s purchase of the Atlantic Magazine and bringing her that much closer to the Washington DC area and to the so-called corridors of power.

Android Authority:

Generally whenever Apple announces a new iPhone it also announces a new System-on-a-Chip, and this year was no different. The newly launched iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and the iPhone X all use Apple’s in-house A11 Bionic processor. Inevitably, comparisons are made between Apple’s latest SoC and the latest offerings from Qualcomm, Samsung and Huawei. It doesn’t usually take long for benchmarking numbers to appear and for Apple to be declared the winner.

So, why is it that Apple’s SoCs always seem to beat the competition? Why are the processors used by Android seemingly so far behind? Are Apple’s chips really that good? Well, let me explain.

Really interesting (and really geeky) analysis.

Tom’s Guide:

There are two kinds of people: those who have needed tech support, and those who constantly give it over the phone to their friends and families. Both know how tricky and complicated this process can be, but Chalk — a new AR app launching today on iOS (for free) — looks to save the day.

Built by Vuforia, the company behind the tools used by the majority of augmented-reality apps, Chalk operates much like a videoconferencing call, connecting the cameras between two remote smartphones. (It’s iOS-only to start.) The only difference is that both use the rear-facing camera, so the person getting help can show the device or software they’re confused by, and the other person can draw on it.

This is one of those apps that really show off the upside of AR. I would have loved to have something like this when I did tech support.

Teach a machine using your camera, live in the browser. No coding required.

A new experiment done with Google.