Apple today previewed iOS 14, introducing the biggest update ever to Home Screen pages with beautifully redesigned widgets and the App Library, a new way to tap into the App Store with App Clips, powerful updates to Messages, and more.
The new widgets present timely information at a glance and can be pinned in different sizes on any Home Screen page. Users can create a Smart Stack of widgets, which uses on-device intelligence to surface the right widget based on time, location, and activity.
Some interesting new features in iOS 14. No name change though.
Apple today previewed watchOS 7, delivering enhanced customization tools and powerful new health and fitness features to the world’s most advanced smartwatch. Personalization is taken to an entirely new level with shareable and discoverable watch face configurations, while sleep tracking, automatic handwashing detection, additional workout types including dance, and a new hearing health feature give greater insight into overall well-being and are designed with privacy in mind. Conveniently on the wrist, Maps is updated with cycling directions and Siri now offers language translation.
“We’re energized by the positive impact Apple Watch is having on our customers and are excited to deliver meaningful new tools that support their health, fitness, and wellness,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer. “watchOS 7 brings sleep tracking, automatic handwashing detection, and new workout types together with a whole new way to discover and use watch faces, helping our users stay healthy, active, and connected.”
HEY blog, this morning (hours before the WWDC keynote), a post from Basecamp CEO Jason Fried:
Late Friday night, on June 19th, Apple’s App Store Review Board surprised us by approving the pending bug fixes to the HEY iOS app that were held up all last week.
The note from Apple:
Hello Jason,
We’ve seen David’s tweets and look forward to working with you on a path forward.
For HEY and for Apple, this seems the best possible outcome, especially given the proximity to the WWDC keynote.
And the letter ends on the best possible note:
And Phil, we set aside an amazing @hey.com address for you. Free for life, our gift to you. Lemme know.
Obviously, this addresses one specific bump in the road. The question remains, will Apple hold fast, or will we see any App Store policy changes this week?
As of this post, Apple’s web site is still up. In past years, this has typically meant no new hardware for immediate ordering. We shall see.
The keynote begins at 10a PT, 1p ET.
If you’ve got an Apple TV, watch in the Apple TV app (if you fire up the Apple Events app, you should get redirected). The event should pop up as we get closer to go time.
If you’re watching in browser, jump to Apple’s official Apple Events web site to watch there.
Apple has been working for years on designing chips to replace the Intel microprocessors used in Mac computers, according to five people with knowledge of the effort.
Oddly specific number. But no matter.
Apple’s move is an indication of the growing power of the biggest tech companies to expand their abilities and reduce their dependence on major partners that have provided them with services for years — even as smaller competitors and the global economy struggle because of the coronavirus pandemic.
And that’s really the core of this story.
Facebook, for example, is investing billions of dollars into one of Indonesia’s fastest-growing apps, a telecom giant in India and an undersea fiber-optic cable around Africa. Amazon has built out its own fleet of cargo planes and delivery trucks. And Google and Apple continue to buy upstarts to expand their empires.
Logical for Apple to want to own the full stack. If it was financially prudent to make all their supply-chain elements themselves, and do all the manufacturing in house, even mine all the materials they use, why wouldn’t they?
But as corporate behemoths grow, the mom and pops of the world fall by the wayside. Interesting read.
The best part of the App Store, years ago, from this developer’s point of view, was that it was easy to charge money for an app. No need to set up a system — just choose the price, and Apple takes care of everything. So easy!
Ah, the good old days. Before the race to the bottom.
But these days, in almost all cases, you’d be ill-advised to charge up front for your app. You need a trial version and in-app purchasing (IAP) and maybe a subscription.
Here’s the thing: this is a massive pain in the ass to implement, test, and support — Apple does not make it easy.
It is harder and harder to make a living building apps. Apple expects a lot from their developers. And if an ARM-based Mac shows up, that’s yet another wrinkle in an already complicated model.
Will Apple talk about the App Store this week, beyond touting numbers? Will we see a “We hear you, and here’s what we’re doing about it” moment?
I’m full of secrets and it’s hard not to overflow right now. But I’ve been trained well.”
This is a big moment. Connecting with developers amid rising tensions, and with huge (rumored) ARM-based Mac news to share. And if that latter news is true, Apple is about to ask developers to shoulder some potentially heavy burdens, that of rebuilding their apps to support a brand new architecture.
While porting your app to support ARM might be as simple as checking a check box and rebuilding, that view seems optimistic. More likely, this change will require more testing hardware purchases, and more time spent porting, tweaking, and testing. More time preparing and sending out beta versions to a limited universe of folks with the right hardware.
Watch the interview, embedded below. Keep in mind, this was yesterday. Tim and company read the blogs, he knows the lay of the land.
It’ll be an interesting afternoon, and an interesting week.
Before its release, the movie was dogged by controversy outside of its subject matter. Starring Samuel L. Jackson and Anthony Mackie, it tells the true story of two African American businessmen in the 1960s. Their actions led to the Fair Housing Act established in 1968.
The kerfuffle between the trillion-dollar tech giant and the founders of Basecamp, a nifty project management tool, centers on an innovative new email service that Basecamp created called Hey.com. As part the Hey.com rollout, the company submitted the mobile app to Apple’s App Store. A spot there is critical for its success.
Apple has asserted its curatorial might most strongly, by far, often in the interests of taming the sprawling and enormous app deluge. Their oversight includes efforts to protect privacy and eliminate dangerous developers who attempt to foist spam and malware on consumers. Mistakes slip through, but Apple runs a tidy ship.
Yet Apple has also changed rules in ways that many developers find capricious and unfair and, more to the point, scary.
Betteridge’s Law applies to the headline but it’s still a good overview of the situation.
A total of 11 Apple stores will close in Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Arizona starting on Saturday. Customers who have products in those stores for repair will have the weekend to get their devices back, Apple said. All of the stores had been reopened since Apple initially closed them in March.
“Due to current Covid-19 conditions in some of the communities we serve, we are temporarily closing stores in these areas. We take this step with an abundance of caution as we closely monitor the situation and we look forward to having our teams and customers back as soon as possible,” an Apple spokesman said in a statement.
No surprise. Apple doesn’t want anything to do with being a vector for this disease.
Gav goes for a swim and shows off the interesting method in which you can get out of the water and immediately hear your sound alerts on the Apple Watch.
Along with Smarter Every Day, The Slow Mo Guys is another fave YouTube channel.
All nine episodes of HBO’s conversation-defining Watchmen television series, a spiritual sequel to the influential Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons comic, will be available free this weekend.
HBO will make the series available for non-subscribers to stream on HBO.com, as well as through Free on Demand services, starting Friday June 19, through Sunday June 21. The company’s press release stated that the move was “an extension of the network’s content offering highlighting Black experiences, voices and storytellers. […] HBO is proud to offer all nine episodes for free of this timely, poignant series that explores the legacy of systemic racism in America.”
I wasn’t a huge fan of the show if only because I had no idea of the characters’ back stories but it was still well done and worth watching.
Dave and I look at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which starts next week, albeit in a very different way than previous years. We also discuss the Hey app controversy that’s happening right now.
Matthew Panzarino did an interview with Apple’s Phil Schiller today about the Hey app controversy, which I’m sure you’ve heard all about by now. Here’s a couple of things that Schiller said:
“You download the app and it doesn’t work, that’s not what we want on the store,” says Schiller. This, he says, is why Apple requires in-app purchases to offer the same purchasing functionality as they would have elsewhere.
That makes sense to me.
One way that Hey could have gone, Schiller says, is to offer a free or paid version of the app with basic email reading features on the App Store then separately offered an upgraded email service that worked with the Hey app on iOS on its own website. Schiller gives one more example: an RSS app that reads any feed, but also reads an upgraded feed that could be charged for on a separate site. In both cases, the apps would have functionality when downloaded on the store.
I’m not sure if the developer could do that, but if they could, the point makes sense.
Schiller also noted the exceptions that Apple allows, which are mostly “reader” apps “that only display external content of certain types like music, books and movies.”
It seems like Hey can fix this by making the app usable on the App Store. It doesn’t sound like that’s what they want to do, so Apple is exercising its right to not allow it on the store at all.
Rene shares his thoughts on what he’d like to see from Apple where macOS is concerned. Worth watching.
But to me, the even more worth watching part is the Lion’s share of the open (pun intended), where Rene riffs about all those Apple OS nicknames. A great history lesson, with some OS names you might not have been aware of.
Every so often, I encounter an image and wonder where it comes from. Or, perhaps, I’m looking for the highest possible resolution of an image. Or I’m trying to track down the creator of the image.
I’ve long used Google’s reverse image search for this purpose. If you’ve not gone down that route, pick an image, head to google.com and try to figure out the interface. Once you know how to jump through the hoops (hint, click Images, then click the camera) the interface is still a bit clumsy. Plus, some object to doing a search with Google looking over their shoulder.
Now give TinEye a try. Click the link, and just drag and drop an image (on the Mac) or tap the up arrow (on iOS) to select an image from your camera roll. I especially appreciate the simplicity of the experience on my Mac. Just drop the image on the TinEye home page. That’s it.
Last night I accidentally deleted my entire library of photos, many of which are (obviously) very important to me.
What follows is a long slow car crash, a combination of misunderstanding where your original photos are stored and, perhaps, ignoring some error messages that would have prevented this situation.
I post this, not to harp on the confusing language of iCloud (it can be confusing, no doubt), but to point out how this user got their photos back.
First, here’s how deleted the photos were:
After freeing up space by deleting my entire photo library on the Macbook, I look at my phone and realize it’s all deleted there as well. Of course, I had also gone to the “recently deleted” and removed all of them because I was trying to free the space on the Mac.
Yup. Those photos are deleted. A backup of your Mac might help here, but set that aside for now.
I called Apple immediately, and was quickly escalated to something along the lines of a “media specialist for iPhoto and iTunes” – honestly it was a very long title, but something like that. He said they have something called “the magic button” which is a level of iCloud that regular users can’t see. The iCloud file recover function didn’t work for me either btw, forgot to mention that.
A magic button you say! First time I’ve heard of this. Interesting.
After he pressed this “magic button”, all the photos came back into my recently deleted section, and I just restored them back to the library.
That’s worth noting. Me, I keep all my original pictures and music on my Mac, then back up that Mac religiously. I have my original music/photo libraries backed up off site, too.
If you use Twitter, you may have noticed a wave of tweets with built-in audio. Tap on the play button and the poster’s Twitter avatar, embedded in a jittery circle, plays audio.
Twitter blog:
Each voice Tweet captures up to 140 seconds of audio. Have more to say? Keep talking. Once you reach the time limit for a Tweet, a new voice Tweet starts automatically to create a thread. Once you’re done, tap the Done button to end your recording and go back to the composer screen to Tweet.
This is a pretty major step up for Twitter, both in terms of enhancing what can be shared, and in the demand placed on their servers.
Audio tweeting is limited to a small number of testing accounts at the moment but will roll out to everyone in the coming weeks. To see if you have the feature, compose a new tweet. If you see the camera icon to the left of your recent pictures (toward the bottom of your compose pane), you don’t have it yet. When you get audio, you’ll get a little waveform icon to the left of your camera.
I wonder how long it will be until we have video tweets.
Apple plans to offer a self-guided activity book for kids to complete, along with live virtual sessions with Apple Store Creatives.
Live sessions, which will be hosted over Webex, will last for 30 to 60 minutes, while the activity book Apple has created is a Pages document that kids can complete at their own pace.
The camp is designated for kids ages 8-12. Visit the official sign-up page to get notified when registration opens.
I got to believe those slots will fill up quickly.
When Apple added the Breathe feature to watchOS 3, I — like many of you, I suspect — turned it off pretty quickly. However, over the last six months, it has come to be one of my favorite things about wearing my Apple Watch.
The Watch app on the iPhone lets you set the length of your sessions, and how many times throughout the day you want to be reminded to pause and breathe, and minutes are totaled in the health app.
It can subtly remind me throughout my day to take a couple of minutes to slow down and focus on breathing. I’ve done it sitting at my desk, in a parking lot, and recently, on the roof of my house as I was cleaning some debris up from a storm.
After mounting pressure from privacy activists and users, Zoom said today that it’ll provide end-to-end encryption protection to everyone — including free users.
Earlier this month, the company had said that it’ll provide this feature to only paid users to comply with law enforcement and catch abusers of the service. After its announcements, several privacy experts wrote to zoom about enabling this feature for all users.
Yesterday, Mozilla foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 19,000 other users sent an open letter to the company, urging it not to make “security and privacy a luxury.” In another letter, digital rights organizations such as Fight for the future and MPower Change conveyed similar concerns.
Yet another example of a company having two options – the “right” thing and the “wrong” thing – knowing what the “right” thing to do is, and still choosing the “wrong” thing only to be forced by public pressure to backtrack and do the “right” thing after all.
Lots to process here. Start off with this tweet, from Basecamp partner and HEY (email client) creator David Heinemeier Hansson:
Wow. I'm literally stunned. Apple just doubled down on their rejection of HEY's ability to provide bug fixes and new features, unless we submit to their outrageous demand of 15-30% of our revenue. Even worse: We're told that unless we comply, they'll REMOVE THE APP.
And with that in mind, check out these two Daring Fireball posts, first here, then here.
There’s been a river of reaction to this situation, some pro Apple (no one is forcing you to put your app on the App Store, but if you do, follow Apple’s rules) and many con (explained in all the links above).
This feels like an inevitable moment of change for the App Store. The question is, will Apple get ahead of the situation and negotiate that change themselves, or will they resist and minimize any change, pay the fine and keep their model as is?
Click the post, then tap the play button. Wait for the model to load, then play. You can rotate the model to see all sides, and pinch to zoom to get closer to the art.
Sitting alone in her bedroom, she stumbled onto an internet video describing a smartphone app called Replika. The app’s sole purpose, the video said, is to be her friend.
Ms. Francola was skeptical. But the app was free, and it offered what she needed most: conversation. She spent the day chatting with the app via text messages — mostly about her problems, hopes and anxieties. The next day, she paid an $8 monthly fee so she could actually talk with it, as if she were chatting with someone on the telephone.
At first blush, this seemed a non-starter. $8 a month for a chatbot?
But reading on, and chewing on the concept, I do get the need here. Loneliness is a powerful, debilitating force, especially in the time of COVID-19. And companionship can be just what the doctor ordered.
The question is, can chatbots cross the uncanny valley, feel real enough that you lose sight of the artificial nature of who you’re chatting with?
Way back in the day, Apple made this amazing concept video called Knowledge Navigator. If you’ve never seen the video, take a few minutes to watch it. It’s from 1987, in the very early days of Macintosh.
The dream was to create an assistant that was completely artificial, but felt human. We are still far from that reality. But the evolution of chatbots seems a slender bridge to that future.
With the US elections less than five months away, today Facebook is launching the largest voting information campaign in American history. We’re building a new Voting Information Center that will give millions of people accurate information about voting, while also giving them the tools they need to register and make their voices heard at the ballot box. Our goal is to help register 4 million voters this year using Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, and help them get to the polls so they can hold our leaders accountable. This goal is double the estimated 2 million people we helped register in both 2018 and 2016.
I am biased here. I am not a fan of Facebook. But I am a fan of any effort to fix the steady drumbeat of false political narrative. And even more a fan of efforts to get people registered to vote.
My initial reaction here was an eye-roll so deep I had to steady myself afterwards. But if Facebook is making an effort to make it easier to register, to give people facts, especially where voting is concerned, how can I be anything but for it?
Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop are complementary tools that a lot of creative professionals use together on the desktop, moving images back and forth. Until now, however, that wasn’t possible on the iPad, which has made it a frequently-requested feature ever since Photoshop debuted on the iPad late last year.
With today’s update to Lightroom, there’s a new option in the share menu called ‘Edit in Photoshop.’ When you select that option, Lightroom converts your image for Photoshop and uploads it to Adobe’s cloud service. As soon as that process is complete, Lightroom automatically launches Photoshop and loads the image. When you’re finished making edits, tap the big, blue button at the top of the screen that says ‘Send to Lightroom,’ and a PSD version of the image is returned to Lightroom where you’ll also find the original image you sent to Photoshop. Alternatively, you can save the PSD file as a cloud-based document without sending it back to Lightroom.
Adobe is slowly but surely making Lightroom and Photoshop for iPad much better and much more full-featured as well as increasing the integration between the two.
The European Commission (EC) has formally opened an antitrust investigation into Apple over rules that force developers to use Apple’s in-app purchasing technology and prohibit them from notifying customers of alternative ways to purchase or subscribe to content.
The EC has also opened a separate antitrust investigation into Apple Pay over concerns Apple has restricted how Apple Pay is integrated into merchant apps and websites, as well as limiting rival payment services’ ability to access near field communication (NFC) technology for in-store payments.
Apple says, “It’s disappointing the European Commission is advancing baseless complaints from a handful of companies who simply want a free ride, and don’t want to play by the same rules as everyone else. We don’t think that’s right — we want to maintain a level playing field where anyone with determination and a great idea can succeed.”
Apple has to be cautious here. The EU is not nearly as “forgiving” of these kinds of actions as the US is.
