Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

The HBO Max application is now available for Apple users with apps for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV: get the app here. HBO Max replaces HBO Now, so if you have the Now app already installed, it will transform into Max the next time the App Store updates your apps. HBO Max is a US-only service.

And:

Alongside everything you expect from HBO, Max content includes the full catalog of sitcom Friends, Looney Tunes, Studio Ghibli, Adult Swim shows, and a documentary on sexual assault accusations against Russel Simmons.

It’s getting crowded out there, so many streaming services to consider.

As to HBO Max, it’s possible you already have access. Check out this article from Yahoo, which details all the side deals that might bring HBO Max to you for free.

For example, I got an email from AT&T telling me my unlimited mobile plan gives me free, day one access to HBO Max. There are lots of other similar deals in place, as HBO Max battles for mindshare.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

New data released by Omdia today says that the iPhone 11 has usurped the crown of being the “world’s most popular smartphone” from the iPhone XR. According to data, Apple shipped 19.5 million iPhone 11 units during the first quarter of this year.

This is remarkable. If you add sales numbers for the next three smartphones together (that’d be the Samsung Galaxy A51, and Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 8 and Redmi Note 8 Pro), they’d just about equal iPhone 11 sales.

Also of note, iPhone 11 Pro Max still lags behind iPhone XR sales. Premium price for the Pro Max, iPhone XR still has legs, though I suspect second quarter will see the rise of the iPhone SE.

Apple:

Following the overwhelming global fandom around the recent debut of the Apple TV+ shorts “Fraggle Rock: Rock On!,” Apple today announced a new partnership with The Jim Henson Company to reboot the beloved classic series “Fraggle Rock.”

And:

The new “Fraggle Rock” series will be reimagined as a global Apple Original series for new generations of fans to enjoy together on Apple TV+. Produced by The Jim Henson Company in association with New Regency, the series will reunite the original stars – Gobo, Red, Boober, Mokey, Wembley and Uncle Travelling Matt – for new songs and adventures, with the same spirit as the classic.

And these nuggets from Vulture:

As part of the agreement, Apple has also acquired exclusive streaming rights to all 96 episodes of the original 1983–87 live-action HBO series (and some specials) and will make them available to subscribers in 100 countries on Wednesday, May 27.

And:

According to a source familiar with Apple’s thinking, the company remains uninterested in using Apple TV+ as a repository for old shows and movies from other suppliers, the way Netflix, Prime Video, and Hulu have done for years. That’s because, per the source, with big studios such as Warner Bros., Disney, and Universal looking to keep their best and biggest titles for their own streaming platforms, there simply aren’t enough great titles around to make a library strategy work.

Some excellent insight there.

Macworld:

Unless you’ve got an iMac and it’s set up in the right place, you might find yourself squinting to see everyone on screen—or leaning in or balancing a laptop on your lap. It’s distracting for you and anyone with whom you’re conversing.

There’s a better way, if you have an Apple TV or a newer TV that supports video streaming over AirPlay 2: you can use AirPlay or AirPlay 2 to stream your Mac, iPhone, or iPad’s screen to the TV. If you purchase an HDMI adapter for a Mac or a mobile device, you can instead hardwire yourself into any TV with an spare HDMI port.

My wife has Zoom meetings all the time and when I showed her how this was possible, she turned her nose up at it with a “…Eww…why?” So your mileage may vary.

From Variety:

The following is a compliment: While watching the new “Mythic Quest” quarantine special, I forgot several times that it is, essentially, a very effective commercial for Apple products.

And:

With video technology already layered into the show, “Mythic Quest” was simply better equipped for a virtual special than most shows ever could be. And from a character standpoint, the show’s collection of nerds work together at an increasingly powerful video game company and already spend their days making cyber connections more tolerable or even more interesting. That is, after all, their literal job.

Some spoilers in the review, so I’d encourage you to watch the episode if you’ve not yet seen it. But the review captures what this episode did so well and, in my mind, shows the evolution of the work-at-home entertainment that we’ll surely see more of over time.

The second review is this one from Mashable, which folds in quotes from an interview they did with star and co-creator Rob McElhenney.

If you are into the show, or interested in the business of Apple TV+, both reviews are worth reading. And both show, to me, how much of a home run this series is for Apple.

With the current rumors about Apple Glass taken as a base premise, Robert Scoble digs into the Apple Glass model from a number of different sides, from fashion, to custom prescription lenses, to AR/LIDAR, to the importance of brick and mortar and Apple’s advantage there.

No way to avoid speculation, since Apple Glass itself is a product concept, pure speculation itself. But an interesting read, if you are so inclined.

Ever get in an argument with someone about a color (it’s blue! it’s green!)? Settle your differences by taking this short online color challenge.

Follow the headline link, you’ll get to a page with four color strips. The endpoints are fixed. All you do is tap/click and drag to reorder the colors in each strip.

Easy peasy. But very difficult to get a perfect score.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Two locations — the stores in Fukuoka and Nagoya Sakae — will reopen on May 27, according to the company’s retail website. Reopening dates for the country’s eight other Apple stores have not yet been posted.

Reminder, check out Michael Steeber’s US/Canada Apple Store reopening map.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

In an internal memo last week, obtained by MacRumors, Apple has indicated that it will assist its third-party repair partners around the world with COVID-19-related expenses, such as cleaning supplies and personal protective equipment.

And:

All eligible Apple Authorized Service Providers will receive a subsidy from Apple by way of increased payouts for each completed repair. The subsidy is retroactive and the length it is offered will depend on stay-at-home guidelines in each country. Service providers are encouraged to contact their Apple representatives for more details.

Seems a smart investment on Apple’s part, some long term thinking.

Follow the headline link for the award page and to see the ad.

But also interesting is the award show itself, all presenters filmed at home. Eerie sign of the times.

Also, also, Apple won Client of the Year as well (about 2:28 in).

The Monday Note:

Who wouldn’t want a neat electric Apple Car? Coming from the Apple Watch, iPhone, and Macintosh maker, it would be an automotive dream come true. Unfortunately, reality refuses to cooperate.

Apple Car speculation never dies. This time, it resurfaces in a research note by Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas, a “Tesla Bull” who’s known for his very sunny views of Elon Musk’s company.

Natural as it might feel, the parallel misses an important factor: Sales and Service. Apple doesn’t have the people and facilities to display, demonstrate, and maintain automobiles.

There are two much more serious obstacles to making the Apple Car dream a reality.

I’ll quibble with Gassee’s headline – there are no “missing pieces.” There’s only the hope, wishes and fever dreams of people who want this to happen without ever examining the question Gassee asks, “Why would Apple do this?”

MacRumors:

Over the past few hours, a number of MacRumors readers have reported seeing dozens or even hundreds of pending app updates showing in the App Store on their iOS devices, including for many apps that were already recently updated by the users. In many cases, the dates listed on these new app updates extend back as far as ten days.

Apple has not shared any information as to why updates for these already up-to-date apps are being reissued, but some users suspect it may be related to the recent “This app is no longer shared with you” issue that was preventing some users from launching certain apps unless they are offloaded or deleted and then reinstalled.

That explains why I woke up to dozens of apps needing to be “updated” this AM.

The Drive:

Plenty of automakers today release autonomous car concepts that look like an ultra-modern living room inside. The steering wheel isn’t there, or it folds away, there’s big touchscreens everywhere—you get the gist. But 34 years ago, at the height of wonderfully strange ’80s design exercises, Italdesign really went for it in the Oldsmobile “Incas” concept with this Knight Rider-looking getup. It’s definitely not your grandfather’s Oldsmobile. Neither will it be your grandson’s, sadly.

The only control that hasn’t been placed on the ‘steering wheel’ is the turn signal. Literally everything else in the interior is a button on the steering wheel: HVAC, lights, audio, cruise and automatic transmission controls are all present.

The entire front windshield and doors pivoted up to allow the driver and passenger’s entry.

What an abomination, not only of the steering wheel but also the dash and the doors. Thank God this never went into production.

Buzzfeed:

Fashion influencer/momtrepreneur/TikToker Jessica Wang started sharing a series of “iPhone tricks” on TikTok, and lemme tell you…even if you THINK you know every iPhone hack in the book, she’ll surprise you with one you don’t know.

I never thought I’d learn anything from TikTok but there are some cool tricks listed here.

John Gruber:

Nilay Patel asked this of Siri on his Apple Watch. After too long of a wait, he got the correct answer — for London Canada. I tried on my iPhone and got the same result. Stupid and slow is heck of a combination.

This is an odd and reproducible error. Fire up your iPhone and ask Siri:

What time is it in London?

I’m curious if anyone, perhaps elsewhere in the world, gets an answer other than the time in London, Canada. How about someone in the UK? Or even London, England?

More from Gruber:

Worse, I tried on my HomePod and Siri gave me the correct answer: the time in London England. I say this is worse because it exemplifies how inconsistent Siri is.

Same. iPhone Siri assumes I mean London, Canada, HomePod Siri assumes I mean London, England.

Edge cases. The bane of any developers existence.

UPDATE: I asked about this on Twitter, got some fascinating replies. In the UK, as you might expect, Siri gives the time for London, England. But in Florida, we get the time in London, England as well, as opposed to other folks in the US, who get London, Canada. Except for one user in Indiana who gets London, Ohio. And another few who get London, Kentucky.

Sounds like a proximity to London (pick the closest one) issue?

NPR:

Tucker, who works at a Sephora beauty store in San Jose, Calif., had never heard of the Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO until a couple years ago, when she began fielding a steady stream of calls and text messages intended for him.

And:

Turns out, Tucker’s cellphone number used to be registered to Musk. On any given day, she receives at least three calls or texts intended for Musk, whom she has never met.

The fact of having Musk’s old number is not what makes this story. It’s the calls and messages.

For example, she texted back and forth with Pixar/Disney’s John Lasseter, who was trying to reach Musk. Fascinating.

Monica Chin, The Verge:

Nick Bryner, a high school senior in Los Angeles, had just completed his AP English Literature and Composition test last week. But when he snapped a photo of a written answer with his iPhone and attempted to upload it to the testing portal, it stopped responding.

The website got stuck on the loading screen until Bryner’s time ran out. Bryner failed the test. He’s retaking it in a few weeks.

In a nutshell, this is about the default file format for iPhone photos, which is HEIC, which brings higher quality images in a smaller file size than JPG. The fault here is with College Board not recognizing this issue in the first place.

This is a dumb mistake on their part. At the very least, they should have simply allowed the files to be submitted, flagging them as unreadable perhaps, but they could have solved the HEIC import problem after the fact and those test takers could have gone on to complete their tests.

Or, just saying, they could have spent a minute to test their system using an actual iPhone, which would have shown them the error of their ways.

That said, good to be aware of the iOS setting that lets you change from HEIC to JPG, in case this sort of thing ever happens to you. Head to:

Settings > Camera > Formats

You’re likely set to High Efficiency (that’s HEIC). Your other choice is Most Compatible (that’s JPG).

Michael Andor Brodeur, Washington Post:

When the covid-19 crisis abruptly canceled its season, Spence launched a weekly series of rebroadcasts to fill the silence. These broadcasts, even with their modest virtual attendance of 100 or so viewers per stream, have been essential to keeping Spence’s Santa Barbara-based chamber organization engaged with its audience.

That is, until that recent Sunday, when his audience started to disappear, one by one, all the way down to none.

And:

Just minutes into the airing of the concert, Facebook issued Spence a notification that his video — an original performance of an hour-long piece composed by Mozart in 1786 — somehow contained one minute and 18 seconds of someone else’s work, in this case, “audio owned by Naxos of America.”

FaceBook and YouTube are issuing takedown notices for an artist’s own performances of public domain music.

The fault is in the bot technology used to scan online music and compare it to recorded work. This is an overreach by, in this case, Naxos Records, who are trying to protect their recordings of, say, Mozart, but using bots that can’t tell the difference between one of their records and Camerata Pacifica’s own recording of the same work.

And this is definitely overreach by Facebook and YouTube.

CNBC:

Netflix will start asking customers who haven’t used its platform in the past year if they want to keep their subscriptions, the company announced Thursday. If a customer doesn’t respond, Netflix will automatically cancel the subscription.

“We’re asking everyone who has not watched anything on Netflix for a year since they joined to confirm they want to keep their membership. And we’ll do the same for anyone who has stopped watching for more than two years,” Eddy Wu, director of product innovation, said in a statement.

This is a great PR move by Netflix. According to Netflix, “inactive accounts represent less than a half of one percent of its overall member base,” so it won’t affect the company’s bottom line by much but they get a nice “we’re the good guys!” bump out of it.

Twitter blog:

Before you Tweet, you’ll be able to choose who can reply with three options: everyone (standard Twitter, and the default setting), only people you follow, or only people you mention. Tweets with the latter two settings will be labeled and the reply icon will be grayed out so that it’s clear for people if they can’t reply. People who can’t reply will still be able to view, Retweet, Retweet with Comment, and like these Tweets.

Predictably, a bunch of tweets immediately rolled out daring folks to reply (with a greyed out reply button making it impossible), or taunting them about their inability to reply. Some came from Twitter itself. Some folks found the bits funny, others not so much.

Nonetheless, good to know the thinking behind all this. This is a limited rollout, so only some people have the ability to limit their replies.

This is a fascinating Hollywood Reporter interview with Mythic Quest series creators Megan Ganz and Rob McElhenney. Here’s just a taste, where McElhenney talks about the technical process:

HR: So you’re all on Zoom?

McELHENNEY: Yeah, you’d open your laptop and would call into Zoom — there would either be five people on there or 45, depending on what the scene or situation was. The way we’d capture the image and the sound was through iPhones. Each actor had three iPhones, and we’d shoot one iPhone at a time. As soon as a scene was wrapped, the phone would be sterilized, packaged, put in a secure area, picked up [by a courier] and brought to editorial, sterilized again, and then the footage would be uploaded to the Avid for the editors, who were working from their homes.

HR: Back up, why did you need three phones?

McELHENNEY: To get [footage] through to editorial as fast as possible, because we wanted to get this episode done and out while we were still in quarantine. The way we’d do each scene is they’d take their laptop/desktop cameras that you would see normally for a teleconferencing thing and they’d put the iPhone directly in front of that camera, so I essentially had video village from my house. I could see what every actor’s camera is picking up and you could also see the readings for the audio. Mike, the cinematographer, could double check all the settings and make sure that everything was running at the right revolution, frame rate, etc. Then we would run the scene, and the actors would be talking to one another the same way we’re talking right now [by phone], through our AirPods.

Season One of the show is complete and available on Apple TV+. The special quarantine episode drops tomorrow.

Apple rolled out iOS 13.5 yesterday (can it already be 13.5? Feels like yesterday when it was this unnumbered thing called iPhoneOS – but I digress). A big part of this update was the public release of Apple’s Exposure Notification API.

First things first, here’s a helpful guide, from Juli Clover, MacRumors, that should clear up some of the mystery and misinformation floating around.

Apple and Google developed the underlying APIs and Bluetooth functionality, but they are not developing the apps that use those APIs. Instead, the technology is being incorporated into apps designed by public health authorities worldwide, which can use the tracking information to send notifications on exposure and follow up with recommended next steps.

And there’s the rub. When you head to Settings > Privacy > Health, you’ll see a toggle to turn on COVID-19 Exposure Logging. Chances are excellent you will not be able to turn that setting on.

The explainer says:

You cannot turn on Exposure Logging without an authorized app installed that can send Exposure Notifications.

A bit down that Settings page, you’ll see a section called ACTIVE APP which lists any Exposure Notification app you have installed.

On my iPhone (and I’m betting, yours too), there’s no app installed, and no clue as to how to go looking for one.

I get that this is early days for the API rollout, but I did find this confusing. Would have been helpful to have some language in there that acknowledged the lack of apps and a pointer to a place to go look for an app for your area as they get rolled out. Perhaps a button that does a search for your area, or a map overlay with status showing any app coverage.

To be clear, the lack of apps is understandable. It takes time to create an app. But releasing the consumer-sided face of the Exposure Notification System without any apps and without a clear message on app status is confusing.

That aside, read through Juli’s writeup for a sense of what this will look like with an app installed.

Also worth reading, Ben Lovejoy’s take on this, With hindsight, Apple and Google should have created contact tracing apps.

Universal Audio released an update that fixed an issue preventing UAD authorization on some Catalina systems. Obviously, this is a big issue if you encountered it, but they fixed it very quickly.

The update also includes the Neve 1084 Preamp & EQ with Unison technology. Neve makes some of my favorite EQs, so having the new Neve 1084 is really exciting for me. I already put it in the Unison slot of Luna template for my projects.

Axios:

The bad news is “The Last Dance” is officially over. The good news is there are hundreds of other sports documentaries waiting to be watched, and this morning, we’re hooking you up with our “Top 50 of all time.”

While some of us are waiting for sports to come back, we can argue about this list. I just saw #45 a few weeks ago and it was much better than I expected, #10 was as riveting as any movie I’d ever seen even though I knew how it ended, and there’s no argument about #1. That it didn’t win an Academy Award is a tragedy.