This is a marketing piece with a short shelf-life, aimed at people interested in this weekend’s heavyweight fight, focusing on underdog Conor McGregor and his fanbase.
Some argue that the ad is manipulative. That may be, but stepping back, I see it as beautifully filmed and evocative. See for yourself.
Great find from Federico Viticci:
Very nice: when sharing AMP pages to iMessage or Reading List, iOS 11 Safari automatically removes AMP’s crap from the URL. Go Apple ? pic.twitter.com/aHgSMcofUv
— Federico Viticci (@viticci) August 23, 2017
To me, AMP serves Google and Google only. It does not move the web forward, it just keeps browsing within Google’s ecosystem.
To see this for yourself, start with an AMP URL. Here’s one example. If you open this link in Safari, you’ll see the link is a Google link, not a Verge link.
If you are running iOS 10, when you tap Safari’s share icon and share the link in, say, Messages, the AMP version of the URL will be shared.
If you are running the latest iOS 11 beta, when you share the AMP link in Messages, the unwrapped Verge link will appear. And that’s the way it should be.
Nice find, Federico. Way to go Apple.
Follow the link. Then go into airplane mode. The page should automatically detect that the connection dropped and reload with an explanation.
An interesting experiment.
The Register:
At an academic speech tech conference today (Thursday), Apple researchers will present some of the classic building blocks behind the voice generation of the Siri assistant.
The conference is this week’s Interspeech 2017, in Stockholm.
From the paper Apple presented:
There are two mainstream techniques for industry production development, namely waveform concatenation (i.e. unit selection) and statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS). Given a sequence of text input, unit selection directly assembles waveform segments to produce synthetic speech, while SPSS predicts synthetic speech from trained acoustic models. Unit selection typically produces more natural-sounding speech than SPSS, provided the database used has sufficient high quality audio material.
This is a bit jargony, but think of unit selection is having access to a bunch of pre-recorded speech components, and assembling them to make syllables and, from those, words.
On Apple’s approach with Siri:
Most recently, much work has centered on using a statistical model to predict acoustic and prosodic parameters for synthesis and then using these predictions to set the costs in a unit selection system – this is known as hybrid unit selection.
Again, a bit jargony, but Apple’s approach (as I read it, no expert me) is the above mentioned unit selection approach, but backed by a learning system that helps make smart decisions about the underlying sounds to use in constructing specific voicings.
Couple things here.
First, this is fascinating stuff. I studied voice synthesis in college and have always wanted to know more about how Siri really works. I’ve watched Siri change voicings in the move from iOS 10 to iOS 11 and wondered why Apple moved from what sounded like a specific person (Susan Bennett) to a more generic, generated voice. I love all the detail in this paper. I can only imagine that the folks at Samsung are poring over the paper right now, competitive juices flowing.
The second thing is Apple’s decision to publicly open up about such critical technology.
Richmond said Apple’s paper is not breaking new ground and “there are no big surprises” but its strategy of releasing a “modest” number of papers could “work as advertising” for talent by hinting at higher quality research and collaboration happening behind “closed doors”.
Sounds about right. The details in this paper might go far enough to be of interest to the folks they want to hire, but without tipping the details of their Siri secret sauce.
Marc Zeedar, TidBITS:
While the App Store may be a senior citizen in Internet time, as a marketplace, it’s barely out of diapers. But we’ve now reached a point where I believe the App Store will either morph into something genuinely useful or fade away as a fad.
I don’t mean that the App Store itself will go away — it won’t — but it could disappear as a business opportunity for most developers. In this dystopian future, the only profitable apps left will be a handful of entertainment apps by huge companies and “business essential” apps, such as those made by banks or news organizations for their customers.
The looming threat that I see is abandoned apps.
Key here is Apple’s plans to deprecate 32-bit apps in iOS 11. If you’ve invested in an app that the developer has no plans to update, that investment may fall to zero. If it’s a 32-bit game you’ve spent a lot of time with, you’ll no longer have access to the game (it won’t load anymore) and your progress is lost to the ages (unless you stop updating your device).
More importantly, if you’ve embraced iOS as your main OS, any data you’ve created using a 32-bit app will no longer be accessible.
On the Mac, if a developer abandons an app you rely on, you can easily make backup copies and reinstall it if needed. If an app won’t run on a new version of macOS, you can theoretically boot from an older version or run the app in a virtual machine. Worst case, you can usually find a way to at least migrate your data to another app.
In iOS, the situation is different. Because Apple exercises total control over which apps are allowed to run and how you get and install them, there is no way to get abandoned apps to work (short of jailbreaking, which introduces its own set of non-trivial problems).
I can’t imagine Apple isn’t working this problem internally. They’ve certainly given plenty of warning. But the stark difference between the impact of major changes in macOS and iOS are worth thinking about.
Read the rest of Marc’s TidBITS post. Thoughtful stuff.
Samsung is working on a smart speaker that will be launched “soon”, the company’s mobile chief told CNBC, which will pit it against the likes of Amazon, Apple, and Google, in the hotly-contested space.
Of course you are.
Uber Technologies Inc reported on Wednesday that its losses narrowed in the second quarter by 9 percent and ride bookings rose, but the company is still a long way from being profitable.
Damn.
Now when you search for “depression” on Google on mobile, you’ll see a Knowledge Panel that will give you the option to tap “check if you’re clinically depressed”, which will bring you to PHQ-9, a clinically validated screening questionnaire to test what your likely level of depression may be. To ensure that the information shared in the PHQ-9 questionnaire is accurate and useful, we have partnered with the National Alliance on Mental Illness on this announcement.
I thought this was a great video from the AppleInsider staff. I’m looking forward to the new WatchOS.
Gruber’s Jackass of the Week. Well said.
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd set out to wipe the slate clean in New York on Wednesday with the new Galaxy Note 8 phablet, hoping features like dual rear cameras and its biggest-ever screen will extinguish memories of its fire-prone predecessor.
Holy sweet shit, why are they doing this?
Apple on Wednesday posted three new articles from the Siri team on machine learning.
Luna Display seamlessly extends your Mac desktop to your iPad, creating a wireless second monitor with stunning image quality. Available for Mini DisplayPort or USB-C, Luna sets up in seconds and instantly works with your existing Wi-Fi.
This is a remarkable product. I had a chance to use it this summer and was truly impressed with the implementation and how it worked.
Today I Found Out:
For the uninitiated, Kinder Eggs are a chocolate treat widely available throughout Europe, Mexico and Canada, with the company that makes them, Ferrero (perhaps better known in the U.S. for being the makers of Nutella), selling a whopping 1.5 billion of the eggs per year. Where they don’t sell any is the United States, where the eggs are indeed illegal (though something of a blackmarket does exist for them). So why is a beloved candy the world over explicitly banned in the land of the free?
I knew that Kinder eggs were illegal in the US (and it’s a point we Canadians often use to show our “superiority” over America) but I didn’t know the legal reasoning behind it.
SMPTE (The Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers) have announced that former Adobe, Macromedia and Apple employee Randy Ubillos will be receiving the Workflow Systems Medal at the SMPTE 2017 Awards later this year.
Cheers, Randy.
In honor of John Lee Hooker’s 100th birthday, Craft Recordings has announced King of the Boogie, a comprehensive, five-disc box set of the blues legend’s greatest hits, plus some rarities, live recordings and numerous previously unreleased cuts.
This is a must have.
Mental Floss:
Throughout the 1980s, Stewart traveled 60,000 miles a year as a full-time spectator, living out of his car, getting stoned, and using television’s obsession with athletics as a vessel for promoting his faith. In doing so, he made the Bible passage a fixture of professional sporting events.
It was a noble effort—but one Stewart would end up undermining with some increasingly eccentric behavior.
If you watched sports in 1980s, you saw this guy in the background of major sporting events. I found him incredibly annoying and, while I never wondered or cared about what happened to him, the path his life took is tragic.
Daily Hive:
The Powerball jackpot now stands more than $850 million CAD according to currency conversion calculators ($700 million USD). At this pace, the Powerball could soon break its own world-record and award a prize higher than the mammoth $2.1 billion CAD jackpot that stunned the world back in January 2016.
According to the official Powerball website, Canadians can “purchase a Powerball ticket…play the game and…collect prizes.” The website clearly states: “You do not have to be a [US] citizen or a resident to play the game.”
Canadians attracted by this amazing jackpot don’t have to cross the border if they want to play to win the exploding Powerball jackpot. They can play from the comfort of their homes.
Many of us Canadians are jealous about the size of the Powerball jackpot. This is an easy way for us (and others outside the US) to get in on the fun.
Joanna Stern, writing for the Wall Street Journal:
You’ve tried to silence unimportant push alerts but couldn’t figure out the complicated settings. Or worse, you thought you mastered the settings, but trivial messages still manage to sneak through like a mouse in an air vent.
Our attention has become such a precious commodity that apps, social networks and, yes, news outlets have deployed infuriating numbers of pop-ups to conquer it.
“Silence all the notifications!” is not the answer, however. Do I want Facebook to ding me to update my profile? Never. But I sure as heck want to be buzzed by the babysitter watching my newborn.
Notifications are a constant river of pain. But they do have value. The key is tuning them. The post does a nice job walking through some settings to give a sense of what lives where and what you can control.
But the article goes further, raising the point of the big UI divide between Apple’s (and Google’s) notification settings and those more fine tuned settings that live inside the biggest offenders, like Facebook.
The system-wide notification settings are found in the Settings app, listed under Facebook. These enable/disable notifications, and specify the various forms those notifications can take. But the detailed notification settings (notify me when someone likes my post, for example) are buried inside the Facebook app itself.
While this division is logical, Joanna makes this point:
The design of this system is confusing. Apple and Google should make it easier for us to get from system settings to individual app menus. It now takes about four taps to get from an app’s home screen to its notification controls.
And when you get there, you often see a long and messy list. The alternative is worse: a single on-off switch—or no notification control at all. Seriously, Lyft, I know when I need you, so alert me when my driver is arriving, not when there’s a sale on rides.
I think this is two separate issues. Nothing Apple can do about the granularity of an individual app’s notifications. That’s an app design issue.
But Apple could make it easier to get from an app’s notifications settings in the Settings app to the more detailed settings in the app itself. Perhaps via a link you tap in the Settings > Notifications > Facebook page that brings you to the sub-page in Facebook itself to tweak the more detail settings. To me, this consistency would be welcome.
Daisuke Wakabayashi, writing for the New York Times:
The company has put off any notion of an Apple-branded autonomous vehicle and is instead working on the underlying technology that allows a car to drive itself.
And:
A notable symbol of that retrenchment is a self-driving shuttle service that ferries employees from one Apple building to another. The shuttle, which has never been reported before, will likely be a commercial vehicle from an automaker and Apple will use it to test the autonomous driving technology that it develops.
And:
Five people familiar with Apple’s car project, code-named “Titan,” discussed with The New York Times the missteps that led the tech giant to move — at least for now — from creating a self-driving Apple car to creating technology for a car that someone else builds. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about Apple’s plans.
The project’s reduced scale aligns Apple more closely with other tech companies that are working on autonomous driving technology but are steering clear of building cars. Even Waymo, the Google self-driving spinoff that is probably furthest along among Silicon Valley companies, has said repeatedly that it does not plan to produce its own vehicles.
This is the way Apple works. In fact, this is the way any large-scale, R&D based business works. Experiment, build, test, learn, pivot. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes you end up going in a completely different direction.
Research counts on missteps. It’s part of the process.
The tone of this article reads to me as: “Apple screws up royally, they just couldn’t build a car, have to settle for the scraps of building a shuttle for its employees.”
Another take could be, “Apple continues to learn about the auto space, takes another step forward by designing and building an actual, working autonomous vehicle which they will put into use moving employees around their campuses. Amazing that they came so far so quickly. Who knows where they’ll ultimately take this technology?”
Me? I think that second take is closer to reality.
From the Medium blog:
Today we’re launching the first step of an exciting new phase at Medium.
We strongly believe that quality content needs to be paid for by consumers — not advertisers — so creators can do their best work, and to align the incentives of everyone involved. So, since March, we’ve been experimenting with our subscription paywall and putting more and more great stories behind it. But that’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of fantastic stories published on Medium every day. And, though Medium is an open publishing platform, we haven’t enabled a way for most of our writers to participate in the economics.
Until now.
In a nutshell, Medium is updating their Partner Program to allow writers to be paid by engagement. And how is that engagement measured?
For the creators in the program, each month you will be paid based on the level of engagement your stories get from Medium members. Essentially, we look at the engagement of each individual member (claps being the primary signal) and allocate their monthly subscription fee based on that engagement. This is one of the reasons we love Claps — it helps us measure the depth of appreciation that a member has for each individual post. (For our members, we’re excited to give you more meaningful control over the stories you support. The more claps you give a locked post, the more share of your membership fee that author will get.)
To me, this move was inevitable. The question is, will this amount to more than pennies for all but the most widely read authors? Reminiscent of the music streaming model.
Yesterday, from a post called Screw you, AccuWeather:
Popular weather app AccuWeather has been caught sending geolocation data to a third-party data monetization firm, even when the user has switched off location sharing.
And Jim’s followup:
How can you ever trust them again? You can’t.
Last night, AccuWeather released this statement:
Despite stories to the contrary from sources not connected to the actual information, if a user opts out of location tracking on AccuWeather, no GPS coordinates are collected or passed without further opt-in permission from the user.
Other data, such as Wi-Fi network information that is not user information, was for a short period available on the Reveal SDK, but was unused by AccuWeather. In fact, AccuWeather was unaware the data was available to it. Accordingly, at no point was the data used by AccuWeather for any purpose.
And
To avoid any further misinterpretation, while Reveal is updating its SDK, AccuWeather will be removing the Reveal SDK from its iOS app until it is fully compliant with appropriate requirements. Once reinstated, the end result should be that zero data is transmitted back to Reveal Mobile when someone opts out of location sharing. In the meanwhile, AccuWeather had already disabled the SDK, pending removal of the SDK and then later reinstatement.
Read the rest of the statement here.
My gut says AccuWeather was caught by surprise here, rather than caught with their hand in the cookie jar. The way I read this, this is an issue with the Reveal SDK, not an intentional act of deception on the part of the AccuWeather app. Disagree?
While CrashPlan was bailing on its customers, Backblaze released a new version of its cloud backup software.
Popular weather app AccuWeather has been caught sending geolocation data to a third-party data monetization firm, even when the user has switched off location sharing.
How can you ever trust them again? You can’t.
It has been a few years since a decision by a major tech company last turned me into a green rage monster, but it just happened again. Code42 Software has announced that it’s discontinuing its consumer backup product, CrashPlan for Home.
Joe Kissell is pissed.
Product Graveyard:
Product Graveyard is a fun way to keep track of and commemorate our favorite products that are with us no more. I worked on this as a side project during my summer internship at Siftery. Hope you enjoy and please join in by contributing a funny story or eulogy for one of the featured products!
It’s a little depressing to see how many of these products I used over the years that are no more.
Gizmodo:
Congratulations to those of you who used proper solar eclipse glasses and witnessed the phenomenon without permanently damaging your vision. Good job! But now you’re probably wondering what to do with those flimsy pieces of cardboard and black polymer that were basically priceless just hours ago.
Fortunately, Astronomers Without Borders has offered to take them off your hands so that children will be able to use them in future eclipses. The organization says it will soon announce a program dedicated to redistributing glasses to schools in Asia and South America, where there will be solar eclipses in 2019.
What a great idea and wonderful service by Astronomers Without Borders.
Of the estimated 2.4m apps available on the App Store, we believe less than 1% leverage ML today – but not for long. We believe Core ML will be a driving force in bringing machine learning to the masses in the form of more useful and insightful apps that run faster and respect user privacy.
It’s going to be interesting to see what we will be able to do with our devices in the next three years as machine learning and artificial intelligence make their way into our lives in a bigger way.
After touring with his prototype models throughout 2016 and 2017, Slash is proud to announce the release of these limited edition Gibson Custom Slash Anaconda Burst Les Pauls.
It’s very nice, but I’m more of an Appetite for Destruction Les Paul guy.
This is a major drop in shipping time, from 6 weeks (down to 4 weeks recently) down to 2-3 weeks. This is on the US Apple Store. Not sure about other countries.