During Apple’s third-quarter earnings call last week, Tim Cook teased a future for Apple TV beyond voice-controlled viewing and simplified sign-ins: “You shouldn’t look at what’s there today and think we’ve done what we want to do,” he said. “We’ve built a foundation that we think we can do something bigger off of.”
And:
The FCC recently took aim at DVR lock-in, proposing that operators deliver their service to any device using any open standard, not just the standard coaxial hookup.
If it becomes a mandate, it would allow Apple TV to become the primary box in our living rooms. It’s a move that would elevate Apple TV without the complexity and cost of negotiating a deal to sell “skinny” channel bundles. The beauty of Apple TV is its interface, and with tvOS powering the grid, there would no longer be a need to have a separate DVR and set-top streamer, putting Apple TV at the center of our home theaters.
This has got to be terrifying to the carriers. Imagine if Google Fibre got enough traction that there was real competition in the net connection marketplace. And then imagine if Apple TV offered an option that was cheaper than cable.
There’s the rub, though. Can Apple bring a package of premium services (HBO, Showtime, etc.) at a lower price than Comcast, Verizon, et al.
Shares (TWTR) closed up 7% Wednesday on speculation about a rumored joint takeover bid by two billionaires who are major Twitter investors: former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, no stranger to substantial tech investments.
Twitter is different than anything Google or Facebook has, at least for me. The mere mention of Ballmer made me shudder.
No single spot can claim to be the Silicon Valley of such companies yet, but Seattle is on the short list of contenders, investors and entrepreneurs say. The area is home to two tech billionaires — Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft — who are funding ambitious, varied efforts to make space more accessible. They have been joined by a few smaller companies like Spaceflight, attracted by Seattle’s abundant supply of software engineers from stalwarts like Amazon and Microsoft and aerospace experts from Boeing, the aviation giant that has major operations in the area.
The 13th straight quarterly loss for the Silicon Valley electric carmaker underscores the financial hurdles that hamper it while it takes on increasingly ambitious goals – a ten-fold ramp of vehicle production in three years and the recent plan to acquire solar panel installer SolarCity Corp.
Tim Cook announced on Twitter Wednesday that July was a record month for the App Store, and that Apple has now paid more than $50 billion to developers. Both represent massive accomplishments, and the $50 billion paid out to developers would make the reputation of any other company for decades to come.
Great news for Apple and developers. I find it mildly interesting Cook tweeted this out instead of issuing a press release.
Houzz shares its unique approach to e‑commerce, and how the experience evolved from a side project for co‑founders Alon Cohen and Adi Tatarko as they renovated their home to a multi-platform app with tens of millions of users monthly.
What seems a strange and complicated ritual is actually simple: Swindonians enter the magic roundabout from one of five points. They aim their car at their destination, yielding to those ahead of them and following the white markings in the pavement.
While a driver entering a normal roundabout might have to make an entire turn to arrive at their destination, a person of Swindon in a magic roundabout can cut through the circles more quickly. A complex pattern emerges.
Roundabouts or traffic circles are fairly uncommon here in North American and can be very confusing to those unfamiliar with their operation. I generally have no problem with them but this “circus” looks like madness. I’m never going to Swindon.
This is my fifth Olympic Games and I am always visiting the Canon Professional Services area to borrow equipment from them. And for all of those previous Olympics, they have always been very guarded about letting anyone, outside of Canon employees, go behind the scenes to see what they have in their inventory. And trust me, I have asked in the past.
Well, this year I was allowed into the back room to see the arsenal of cameras and lenses, and it was incredible! I have a warning for all the photographers out there. The photos in this blog are going to make you salivate!
Canon (and Nikon and others) operate a “loaner program” for professional shooters at major events like the Olympics and the Super Bowl. Photographers can borrow lenses, camera bodies, get gear cleaned, get advice from the over 70 support staff and basically test out the latest and greatest offerings. Imagine the logistics of taking care and keeping track of all this gear.
Named for America’s 33rd president, the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier and its 5,500 crew members have been involved in more than 2,000 missions against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Bild offers an exclusive inside look at life onboard this floating city.
Fire up your Chrome browser and check out this really cool 360° video. There’s not as much flight operation as I’d like to see but it’s still an interesting look at the daily, ordinary life on board one of the most amazing and complex machines mankind has ever built. Make sure you scroll around and check out some of the details of the ship.
Developer John Saddington is definitely raising his 5-year-old daughter Arden well. He shared a blog post and video with me this morning that I just had to pass along. John had purchased a poster celebrating the 1997 Apple “Think Different” ad campaign and has had the poster on the wall of his bathroom since 2012. Arden surprised John by memorizing the speech, so he took a video — complete with intro.
This might be the single cutest thing you watch all day.
At Apple, we take a holistic view of diversity that looks beyond the usual measurements. A view that includes the varied perspectives of our employees as well as app developers, suppliers, and anyone who aspires to a future in tech. Because we know new ideas come from diverse ways of seeing things.
These are great numbers for Apple. They are moving in the right direction and they care.
The #1 app for turning your iPad into a drawing tablet for Mac! Astropad allows you to use your iPad to draw directly into Photoshop and any other Mac creative tools, including: Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Affinity, Corel Painter, Manga Studio, Pixelmator, Mischief and any other Mac app you like!
I’ve mentioned a number of times in the last week about my increasing fascination with telescopes and space, so I thought I’d post some of the ones I’m looking at. The price variance is incredible, as are the features. I still need to do a lot more research, but it’s interesting to see what they can do.
Earlier this year, we released two amazing new services: 1Password Families and 1Password Teams. Both rely on our new hosted platform to bring awesome new features that weren’t possible when 1Password was just a standalone app.
The response has been amazing and many of you asked for a special plan so you could also enjoy these benefits. We now have the perfect answer: our new service made for individuals!
I love 1Password. It’s installed on all of my devices and has been for quite a while. It’s a company I trust.
The Transit Elevated Bus (TEB) is powered by electricity and can carry passengers above two lanes of traffic while cars drive underneath it. The 22 metre long, 7.8 metre wide and 4.8 metre high bus trundled along a 300 metre stretch of road in the city of Qinhuangdao, Hebei province, at an excruciatingly slow speed for its inaugural test run, but the finished version should hit speeds of 40 mph.
It’s no secret that I love, and use, Ulysses all day long — nor is it no secret that I publish with WordPress and only use iOS. This storm of factors means that I have a very specific set of requirements to make a dream writing app, and The Soulmen (the company behind Ulysses) asked me what I still yearned for in their app. The above features were at the top of my very short list.
Apple argued that Caltech did not file the lawsuit until May 26, 2016, more than six years after the publication of the 802.11n wireless standard, and thereby the time limit to collect damages has passed under U.S. law. It also argued that Caltech does not make, use, or sell any product that practices any claim of the asserted patents.
The concept of using emoji for search has been around for a while, but it came up in conversation yesterday, so I thought I’d write up a little how-to.
On your iOS device, hit the home button and pull down to bring up Spotlight. Next, bring up the emoji keyboard and type the apple symbol (it’s the first emoji in the fourth section, labeled Food & Drink).
As soon as you type the Apple emoji (?), Spotlight will bring up various search results, the vast majority related to Apple and the Apple Store.
Try some other emoji. For me, the slice of cake (?) brought up a list of various bakeries in Maps. Even if Spotlight doesn’t associate the emoji with a built-in search, it will search elsewhere. For example, when I searched using the thumbs up emoji (??), Spotlight returned a list of recent Messages that used that emoji.
One final bit: This same technique works on your Mac, too. On your Mac, bring up Spotlight by tapping the magnifying glass in the menu bar or by typing command-space. If you type the french fry emoji (?), Spotlight will search for fast food.
I found this fun to play with. Another little detail that someone at Apple sweated over.
If you’ve never used the Mac’s Console application (Applications > Utilities), this article is a solid place to start. Not only does Kirk McElhearn show off some of the basic Console features, he also focuses on what’s new in the much improved macOS Sierra version.
Console is an important resource. Pretty much everything you do on the Mac ends up sending a message which is accumulated in a log somewhere. Console lets you read through those logs and, as Kirk shows you, this new version of Console makes it much easier to find what you are looking for.
Twitter’s latest iOS update, released today, now includes iPad-compatible keyboard shortcuts. Users with paired Bluetooth keyboards or Smart Keyboards will now be able to use their keyboards to create new tweets, or move between tabs.
And:
Holding down the command key on the keyboard on devices running iOS 9 or higher shows a small dialog indicating which keyboard shortcuts are available to use.
A lawsuit in a federal court raises the ticklish issue of whether a company can be hauled to court because its augmented reality game places coveted fantasy creatures and in-game benefits in private property without permission.
Jeffrey Marder, a resident of West Orange, New Jersey, found in the days after the release of the successful augmented reality game Pokémon Go, that strangers, phone in hand, had begun lingering outside his home.
At least five of them knocked on Marder’s door and asked for access to his backyard to catch and add to their virtual collections of the Pokémon images, superimposed over the real world, that the game developer had placed at the residence without his permission.
No easy fix here. If this lawsuit is allowed to go forward, Niantic is going to have a thorny problem to solve. The database they rely on is incredibly large and complex. I can’t imagine it will be easy to excise all the private property from the map. And, if they do, will they replace those gyms and pokéstops? Or will the game get more sparsely populated?
Is this much ado about nothing? Not sure. But if the lawsuit does gain some teeth, I can definitely see lots of folks jumping on the bandwagon.
The intent of the Apple TV Remote app is to duplicate all the functionality of the hardware remote, and in that it mostly succeeds. The majority of the screen is taken up by an area that mimics the hardware remote’s touch surface, and you can swipe or tap to control the onscreen interface. There are also dedicated buttons for Menu, Home (which you can double tap to bring up the multitasking switcher), Play/Pause, and Siri.
And:
It seems that if you have HDMI-CEC enabled to control your TV’s volume via the remote, it seems the iOS device’s physical volume buttons will actually control your TV’s sound.
This is just a bit of the review. If you haven’t downloaded the new Remote app (it is a completely different app – I deleted my old one), it is absolutely worth it.
Note that it works with the previous generation Apple TV and allows you to save profiles for multiple Apple TVs, in case you have more than one.
Compression is an invaluable tool for audio engineers. Despite having been engineering for over 15 years now, I feel as if I’m still learning new techniques and applications for compressors on a regular basis.
Compression is a great thing for gluing a mix together, if used correctly. Not everyone uses it correctly.
Chip-card checkout nightmares? WSJ’s Joanna Stern explains the transition to the new EMV chip cards for credit and debit, and why your smartphone is the real answer to all your payment problems.
It seems amazing that the U.S. is having such a tough time with this while the rest of the world has been using it for a while now.
This is an amazing album, and one that I saw being made. It follows battles from the 20th century, including World War I and World War II. Give it a listen.
Kudelski said in a statement that the deal includes a “comprehensive patent license agreement” with Apple and that all pending patent litigation between the two companies would be dropped. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Okay, two things: First, Apple hasn’t removed the headphone jack, those are only rumors. Second, I’m saving this video for later because Samsung is pretty quick to copy everything Apple does.
P.S. Pay your debt to Apple, Samsung, you thieving bastards.
