While exploring Cierva Cove, a glacial bay off the peninsula, a scientist aboard Cornell’s boat became excited by one iceberg in particular. “Everything I was seeing was pretty exciting,” Cornell admits. “This particular iceberg at the time kind of blended in with all the crazy stuff we were seeing.”
But as they approached the mass, which rose about 30 feet out the water, Cornell understood his guide’s excitement. Whereas most iceberg tips are covered in snow or have been weathered by the elements, this one was free of debris, exposing glassy, aqua-green ice with water flowing through it—“almost like an ant colony,” he says.
Hard to argue with the headline. Pretty cool image. And in some ways, this is like seeing an endangered species.
Adam Cheyer was one of the people behind Siri which was acquired by Apple in 2010. Since then, Cheyer has created a next generation voice assistant called Viv which was acquired by Samsung in 2016. Viv is [now] a wholly-owned subsidiary of Samsung with the South Korean titan looking to integrate the technology into future products.
Watch the video embedded at the top of the article. Interesting to hear Cheyer’s point of view. Interesting that he specifically leaves out Google in his list of companies competing in this space.
After President Donald Trump said Thursday that the United States will withdraw from the landmark Paris climate agreement, Apple CEO Tim Cook expressed his disappointment with the decision.
In an email to employees, which was obtained by CNBC, Cook said he had tried to push Trump prior to the decision to keep the U.S. in the agreement.
And here’s the email:
Team,
I know many of you share my disappointment with the White House’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. I spoke with President Trump on Tuesday and tried to persuade him to keep the U.S. in the agreement. But it wasn’t enough.
Climate change is real and we all share a responsibility to fight it. I want to reassure you that today’s developments will have no impact on Apple’s efforts to protect the environment. We power nearly all of our operations with renewable energy, which we believe is an example of something that’s good for our planet and makes good business sense as well.
We will keep working toward the ambitious goals of a closed-loop supply chain, and to eventually stop mining new materials altogether. Of course, we’re going to keep working with our suppliers to help them do more to power their businesses with clean energy. And we will keep challenging ourselves to do even more. Knowing the good work that we and countless others around the world are doing, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about our planet’s future.
Our mission has always been to leave the world better than we found it. We will never waver, because we know that future generations depend on us.
Your work is as important today as it has ever been. Thank you for your commitment to making a difference every single day.
Tim
A quote from Trump’s speech:
I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.
In response, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto tweeted:
As the Mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy & future. https://t.co/3znXGTcd8C
Beginning June 6, users of the Waze Carpool app will be able to find rides from Waze drivers already going their way – and vice versa – throughout the state, expanding on a service only available to date in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Sadly, my first thought was to be careful of who you drive with. However, it is an interesting experiment.
Adobe has launched a new way to turn your physical documents into PDFs with editable text, and it’s completely free. The company has released a new mobile app simply called “Scan” for both iOS and Android, and to create a digital copy of a document, you merely have to point your phone’s camera at it.
I rarely need to do this which is why I’ve never paid for an iOS app that does it but for those of you who need to do this kind of stuff, this might be just the ticket. There are the usual privacy concerns though. >
It automatically uploads your scans to Adobe Document Cloud, so you can access them on any computer, phone or tablet.
That may not be something you want, depending on the sensitivity of the documents.
Apple today announced that its global developer community has earned over $70 billion since the App Store launched in 2008. The App Store is home to the most innovative apps in the world and in the past 12 months alone, downloads have grown over 70 percent.
“People everywhere love apps and our customers are downloading them in record numbers,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Seventy billion dollars earned by developers is simply mind-blowing. We are amazed at all of the great new apps our developers create and can’t wait to see them again next week at our Worldwide Developers Conference.”
Those numbers are just insane to think about. The types of apps being developed have become more complex in recent years, allowing us to do so much more with our iPhones and iPads. Having powerful hardware is very important, but having a thriving ecosystem of apps to run on the hardware is important too.
Halide aims to be the ideal, elegant middle ground between ‘too simple’ and ‘airplane cockpit,’ peacefully co-existing with the iPhone’s default Camera app and perhaps occupying at least some of the same muscle memory space.
Halide starts out shooting in smart auto mode, but a single tap calls up a manual mode where you can adjust ISO, shutter speed and white balance. The same gestures you use with the iPhone’s native camera work for Halide, though with some variations.
While much of the Mac Tech Media have raved about Halide from Chroma Noir (App Store affiliate link), I really appreciate DPReview’s hands-on description that includes the pluses and minuses, helping me to make a better buying decision.
We spent a week driving the Bolt in upstate New York to get an idea of what it’s like to live with a fully electric car on a daily basis — and whether we’re ready to give up our gasoline-powered people movers just yet.
The video isn’t hugely interesting (it’s not Top Gear after all) but it does point out the challenges of an all-electric vehicle for those who don’t live in a major city. Would you buy a Chevy Bolt?
Apple on Thursday will announce some great new features for Swift Playgrounds, the company’s educational coding app for iPad. With version 1.5, being released on the opening day of its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 5, Swift Playgrounds will feature support for robots, drones and musical instruments. I met with Apple executives and a couple of educators to talk about the news.
Once the update is released, kids will be able to connect to Bluetooth-enabled devices, like robots and drones, within the Swift Playgrounds app and learn to control them using the same fun software environment that they’ve been using for the past year. This version takes kids from moving a character around the iPad screen to actually controlling a physical object in real-life.
All of the companies that Apple partnered with for this new version will provide course material in the Swift Playgrounds app. You can go through the lessons, just as you would before, but you get to see a robot dance, or a drone fly when you execute the code.
At its heart, Swift Playgrounds is all about teaching people how to code. It’s about helping educators engage their students, and it’s a mission that’s been going on at Apple for a long time.
“Education is in our DNA; for 40 years its been in our DNA—those aren’t just words to us,” said Susan Prescott, Apple vice president of Product Marketing for Apps, Markets and Services. “It’s really been important to us to figure out how technology can transform teaching and learning in the classroom.”
Swift Playgrounds has struck a chord with educators, like nothing has in the past. Two educators, Kelly Croy, from Oak Harbor, teaches at the Oak Harbor Middle School in Benton Carroll Salem School District, and Kasia Derza, who teaches at the Mariano Azuela Elementary in Chicago Public School District, have both seen it first hand.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen that level of engagement with anything I’ve used in my 26 years of teaching,” said Croy, speaking about Swift Playgrounds.
Croy said students come in during lunch, after school, and they are emailing questions all the time. Derza has seen similar situations with her students, saying that they stay in for recess because they want to finish the project.
“You can see the satisfaction on their faces,” said Derza.
As with everything Apple does, Accessibility is also very important to the company in education.
“We made it a priority to make sure it was absolutely accessible to all kids. We partnered with our accessibility team and they were able to do some amazing things—that’s something we’re super proud of,” said Cheryl Thomas, Apple vice president of Software Engineering Operations.
Apple is working with a number of third-party companies to bring these lessons to Swift Playgrounds. LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3, Sphero SPRK+, Parrot’s Mambo, Rolling Spider and Airborne, UBTECH’s Jimu Robot MeeBot Kit, Wonder Workshop’s Dash, and Skoog, are all part of the new version.
Everything that kids code in Swift Playgrounds can control and interact with the sensors and motors to control movement and make a robot dance, or a drone fly and do flips in mid-air. It really is amazing.
What is truly amazing to me is that Swift Playgrounds even exists. Apple doesn’t have to provide this level of support for educators, but they do. In speaking with the Apple executives today, it’s clear that this is deeply personal for the company, and all of the individuals involved in this project.
Swift Playgrounds is a lot of fun to use, and it teaches people quality skills that will help them in the future. This is a great project from Apple, for educators, and most importantly, the students.
I fell down a well of guitar videos yesterday. More specifically, a well of multiple people playing a single guitar. Who knew this was a thing, and that there were so many of them.
I picked three. Please do add your own favorites to the comments.
In a new Apple ad, a thief breaks into “your phone” but struggles to get into an iPhone. Here’s how it plays out in the real world.
I was all set to read about how the ad was wrong, that Android phones were actually just as safe. But:
There are several reasons why iPhones are more secure than the various phones running Android software, according to Mike Johnson, who runs the security technologies graduate program at the University of Minnesota.
Side note: That’s no small-time opinion. The University of Minnesota has one of the best computer science programs in the US.
Moving on:
The old rule about PC viruses seems to be holding true with mobile phones, as well. Android phones make up more than 80% of the global smartphone market, and hackers are more likely to succeed if they write programs for these devices, just because of sheer numbers.
The Windows vs Mac logic. Certainly true.
Plus, he says, the process of “patching” security holes is easier on iOS devices. Apple’s iOS operating system only runs on iPhones, while Alphabet’s Android software runs on phones made by numerous manufacturers. It’s more complicated to deliver patches, or bug fixes, that work across so many device makers and carriers. Android can release a patch, but it won’t necessarily be available on all devices right away.
“Fragmentation is the enemy of security,” Johnson says.
And:
Last year, Wired magazine reported that one security firm was offering up to $1.5 million for the most serious iOS exploits and up to $200,000 for an Android one, a sign that iOS vulnerabilities are rarer.
Add to that Apple’s underlying review process, designed to restrict the use of private APIs, controlling techniques that could end-around Apple’s security processes. Not perfect, but world’s better than the more wild-west Android ecosystem.
The iPhone-maker has started manufacturing a long-in-the-works Siri-controlled smart speaker, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple could debut the speaker as soon as its annual developer conference in June, but the device will not be ready to ship until later in the year, the people said.
There’s more to the post, but that’s certainly the core chunk of news.
Now make your way over to this Daring Fireball post, where John Gruber digs through the Bloomberg piece, making three major points.
The Bloomberg article is long on words, short on actual news, journalism stretched for time. I hate to see this become habit and I certainly do my best to keep my stuff short and to the point (but being an old codger, I do tend to wander occasionally).
This:
The closer we get to the WWDC keynote, the more likely things are to get spoiled. But here we are 5 days out and no one has leaked just about anything about iOS 11 or MacOS 10.13, or what’s going on with this 10.5-inch iPad Pro, or if there’s anything new coming for WatchOS or tvOS. Again, there’s a lot of time between now and Monday morning, but it might be time to give Tim Cook credit for “doubling down on secrecy”.
Excellent point. In the olden days, Apple was a much smaller universe, with far fewer analysts, journalists, and op-ed speculators. To keep secrets in these times is truly an accomplishment. Kudos.
And finally, there’s the question of screen or no screen. From Gruber:
At the end of Gurman and Webb’s report: “Apple’s speaker won’t include such a screen, according to people who have seen the product.” That sets up a delicious claim chowder standoff with Ming-Chi Kuo, who wrote two weeks ago, “We also believe this new product will come with a touch panel.”
I put the question out there on Twitter, what recent products has Apple shipped without a touch screen? My thinking was, are any of these products similar to the Siri speaker concept? There’s the iPod shuffle, the Mac Pro, AirPods, the Airport Express, and the Apple TV.
To me, the Airport Express and the Apple TV seem the closest to the Siri speaker, screen-wise. To configure either of these devices, you use a separate screen. The complexity of the settings is too much for a built-in panel to properly serve.
And if the screen is intended as a feedback device, like a built-in iPad, for showing the weather or playing videos, that seems like a second generation add-on, a secondary SKU. Pure conjecture on my part, but I cast my claim-chowder-registered vote for no-screen.
Apple—the forty-one year old technology company from Cupertino, California—is known for unveiling technology that is often ahead of the curve. Which is to say, once Apple does something, the competition tends to follow suit. Climate scientists will hope this will again be the case as Apple recently unveiled their most eco-friendly store to date. The store will not only be filled with trees, but will operate from a handful of sustainable sources as well. Aptly, the store will be located in Singapore, the greenest city in Asia. With the opening over the weekend, Apple finally opened their first-ever store in Southeast Asia.
If nothing else, click through to the article and check out the picture of that staircase, beautifully crafted from Italian marble. Gorgeous.
We all may have thought that product delivery by drone was the next big Amazon thing. But the future turns out to be a typical retail store in the Time Warner Center off Columbus Circle. Another half dozen are due this year, including a second Manhattan store, on 34th Street.
The speculation is that dozens more are planned nationally and that Amazon, which already handles nearly half of the nation’s book sales, may eventually expand into selling far more products than the books and Kindle electronics the stores currently offer.
And:
Ask a worker about the narrow predictability of data mining, and the reply comes: “It’s data with heart.” Amazon says its recommendations include in-house “curators’ assessments” to add a variable touch to the crowdsourcing.
This seems the future of the brick and mortar, slowly crushing the mom and pops under a massive pile of data.
Uber’s first-quarter loss, excluding employee stock compensation and other items, was $708 million, narrower than the $991 million reported three months earlier, the Journal said.
Bungie’s story rivals gaming’s most volatile, its marriage to Halo growing steadily uneasy under fatigue, hubris and the weight of blockbuster expectation when it wasn’t at risk of being outright consumed from within. Yet like Master Chief, Halo is defined by a devotion to fight: even when it stumbles, the series manages, valiantly, to up the ante. Xbox just wouldn’t exist without it.
I’m not much of a gamer but Halo was so incredible, I bought an Xbox just so I could play it.
…former employees at The Melt, ranging from the top echelons of the company to in-store crew members, tell a complicated story of a company that had to roll out sweeping changes to its initial model after overestimating the competitive advantage of its technology — which proved to be both a source of strength and, at times, a liability.
When I first heard of this “grilled cheese restaurant’ in 2011, I predicted it would be a failure. I think the last paragraph shows why:
“I think if you’re looking for the angle of, like, what went wrong, I would say that nothing went wrong,” Kaplan told me when we last spoke. “But what we did learn is that the quality of the food is the most important reason why someone comes to a restaurant.”
If that’s something you had to “learn” before opening a restaurant, you were destined to fail.
One question: About two minutes in, we see a shot of an outbuilding that looks like a barn, sitting off center on what appears to be a concrete pad. Anyone know what that is? If so, please tweet at me.
I do find it fascinating to watch an architectural vision come to full fruition. This is a beautiful design, incredibly detailed, massive in scope.
Underscoring that Apple Campus 2 is at once one of Silicon Valley’s wildest sketches of the future and a portal to its past, the company has set aside a place on its state-of-the-art campus for the Glendenning Barn, named for a pioneer family whose land became a magnet for tech companies after the blooms faded from their orchards. Constructed in 1916 with planks of redwood, the barn was built to last, though its founders couldn’t have foreseen all that it would withstand: the decline of local agriculture, the rise of big tech and several changes of the guard in Silicon Valley, not to mention Apple’s earth movers.
Thanks for all the response. Love this bit of preserved history.
Several reports have indicated WWDC will introduce several new Apple hardware products alongside the headline software announcements like iOS 11 and macOS 10.13. Today, Eurasian regulator filings (which have proved reliable before) suggest that new iPad and MacBook (Pro?) models are on the way, as has been reported before.
The filings also suggest that a revision to the wireless Apple Magic Keyboard is imminent.
The UINavigationBar, navbar for short, has been around since the original iPhone. Historically, navbars have been convenient and clear, easy to understand and easy to build.
The navbar is the strip at the top of your phone that lets you move in and back out of views. As an example, in the Messages app,the nav bar has an Edit button on the left side, the title Messages in the middle, and a create new message icon on the right. If you tap on a message thread, the nav bar will change to a “<” on the left. Tap that “<” and you’ll navigate back to the main view.
Back to Brad’s post:
Then phones ballooned, enough that the iPhone 7 Plus supplanted sales of the iPad mini. Now, if you own a modern iPhone, navbars can feel unwieldy — literally out of touch.
Burgeoning screens mean the distance between the navbar and our thumbs has grown. The screen on a 7 Plus is so tall it would take a thumb-length increase of 150 percent to reach those pesky buttons with one hand. Just another knuckle or two. Nothing weird.
He does have a point. I use a Plus, and when I need to work the navbar, I either have to use my other hand to reach the top of the screen, or do a weird slidey move to work the phone down so I can reach the navbar with my thumb.
iOS does feature that double-touch the home button gesture to bring the top of the phone halfway down, but I find that takes too long, given that I have to also do the double-touch to restore to full screen. The double-touch is my least favorite solution. [UPDATE: Yup, you can tap to dismiss this. Still don’t like it.]
Read the post for thoughts on how Apple is already addressing this issue and steering away from the venerable navbar. Terrific.
Apple today announced Carpool Karaoke: The Series will be available to Apple Music subscribers starting Tuesday, August 8. The show will feature many of today’s biggest names in music, television, film, sports and pop culture buckling up and belting out their favorite songs for a road trip filled with comedy, conversation and music.
I’m hoping they can pull this off because what James Corden did was really special.
Street View started out as Larry Page’s far-fetched idea to create a 360-degree map of the world. Today, 10 years after the first imagery was published in Street View, people can scale mountains, dive into the depths of the ocean, scout out ramen spots, and walk through museums in far corners of the world.
That was a pretty far-fetched idea, but it is cool.
Uber has long denied the accusations. But when Mr. Levandowski was ordered by a federal judge to hand over evidence and testimony to that end, he asserted his Fifth Amendment rights, seeking to avoid possible criminal charges, according to his lawyers. Uber has been unable to convince Mr. Levandowski to cooperate.
Executives from some of the globe’s leading technology firms are demanding that Texas not adopt “discriminatory” bathroom legislation. On the table in Texas is a law similar to one enacted—and later partially repealed—in North Carolina. The tech companies have aligned themselves with critics of the bill who believe the legislation is unfair to the transgender community.
“As large employers in the state, we are gravely concerned that any such legislation would deeply tarnish Texas’ reputation as open and friendly to businesses and families,” the companies wrote Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. “Our ability to attract, recruit and retain top talent, encourage new business relocations, expansions and investment, and maintain our economic competitiveness would all be negatively affected.”
Always fascinates me to see major corporations get involved in politics and to see which causes they try to throw their weight behind.
This scene never gets old. Listening to Scott talk about its creation is a great joy and the reason why I love Director’s Commentaries on movies so much.
