D. Griffin Jones - page 18

Røde, maker of high-quality audio products from Australia, has unveiled what it calls “the most powerful wireless mic ever”. The Røde Wireless Pro is a system of elegant and compact microphones with an audio recorder that “delivers crystal-clear, incredibly stable audio with a range of up to 260m.”

The kit comes with all the accessories needed to connect to any modern smartphone, computer and camera rig. Røde’s GainAssist makes sure you have balanced sound in any circumstance and the Røde Central software for Mac and PC easily syncs it with your video.

The Røde Wireless Pro kit retails for $399 and will be available later this month.

Twenty-six years ago, everyone knew personal computers were important, but the machines were too intimidating for non-technical people. Then, 25 years ago today, the original iMac changed that forever.

The first time I encountered an iMac was totally transformative. My core beliefs of what was possible on a computer were deeply shaken. It instilled in me a lifelong love for the Mac.

You can split up a big purchase across four smaller payments using Apple Pay Later. Unlike other similar services like Klarna, Afterpay and Affirm, there’s no interest — you pay the exact same amount of money as if you were purchasing at once.

Payments are expected every two weeks, matching the most common paycheck schedule in the United States. It’s easy to use and transparent about what you’ll pay when; it couldn’t be more straightforward.

Dear university students: While it’s tempting to buy the hot new MacBook Air, doing so would mean a huge loss of flexibility. You simply don’t need to pay hundreds of dollars more for a laptop that’s less versatile. An iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard and Pencil fits your needs much better, especially now that it has the very same M2 chip inside.

And beyond the versatility, the whole iPad lineup can do just about everything you can expect a Mac to do every day.

To be clear, there are exceptions to this — some students really do need a Mac. But odds are you’re not one of them.

Planet of the Apps is a series of interviews with app developers about making, marketing and maintaining apps in the App Store.

Indie developer and podcaster Casey Liss used to hate SwiftUI, Apple’s controversial UI toolkit for crafting apps. A lot of developers have a deep and abiding animus for SwiftUI, including Liss himself. But after using SwiftUI to create his latest app Callsheet, a movie and TV database app, he’s now a huge fan.

“So much of SwiftUI, I love,” he said in a wide-ranging and surprisingly-interesting interview. “I went from nothing to a fully functional app … in the span of a couple of weeks… It was stunningly fast.”

They say the early bird gets the worm. But the bird that’s too early spends an hour looking for worms in the middle of the night and has to give up after a while. That’s an apt summary of the Newton Messagepad, Apple’s handheld computer that launched on this day in 1993.

The Newton launched at a high price and with a somewhat limited feature set. As a result, it never found a strong enough customer base or a “killer app” to make it a must-have device.

But all these years later, I still found two good uses for my Newton MessagePad 2000.

If you miss the Twitter icon, you’re not alone. But there’s good news: You can easily change the app’s new X icon back to Twitter’s blue bird on your Home Screen by using a shortcut.

While it’s too late for Elon Musk to backtrack on many of the questionable business decisions he made since buying Twitter, you can at least patch over this latest one using my free downloadable Shortcut.

If you’re still using X, née Twitter, you might want the bright blue bird back on your Home Screen. I’ll show you how to get it.

Arc is a new kind of web browser that recently launched for Mac. It breaks free of the conventional tabbed window design with an all-new approach to organizing your internet activity without slowing you down along the way.

The top talent at The Browser Company, Arc’s developer, are taking bold approaches behind the scenes as well. The Windows version won’t be rewritten in C++ as with most Windows programs. Instead, the team is creating a custom toolkit to compile its code in Apple’s Swift language on Windows.

You can download Arc here for free from The Browser Company.

The Kuxiu X40 3-in-1 charger simplifies travel by juicing up your iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods from one device, cable and outlet. It folds flat for sticking in your bag — it even comes with a little carrying case. Its handsome design and premium materials make it suitable as a permanent desk companion, too.

Without a handy travel charger like this, hitting the road with all your devices — iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods and possibly a MacBook, iPad or Nintendo Switch — can become a big nightmare of device-specific cables. iPhones and AirPods charge with a Lightning cable, the Apple Watch has its own unique puck thing and most other devices are on USB-C, except for some MacBooks that have MagSafe, too.

The Kuxiu X40 replaces two to three of the special charging cables that we, people with Apple devices, are used to taking with us everywhere we go. You don’t need your Lightning cable and your Watch cable. All you need to put in your bag is the Kuxiu X40 and a beefy USB-C power cable to charge all your devices on a weekend away from home.

It’s regularly on sale for less, but even its original $79.99 price is competitive for what you get.

An anonymous tipster has bad news for the Mac Pro: Apple apparently has no plans to keep working on the scrapped chip that would have doubled the machine’s power. Development on Apple silicon is reportedly set all the way through the M5 generation.

There’s a beacon of hope, though. Multi-die packaging — technology being developed that could see the light of day around the M8 chip — eventually might give the Mac Pro the power it deserves. However, at Apple’s current pace, that’s at least six years away.

A new leak outlines how the 2024 iPhone Pro Max might improve upon the upcoming iPhone 15 Pro Max’s camera. While this year’s model reportedly will introduce a new periscope lens, the iPhone 16 Pro Max could come with an ultra-long telephoto periscope lens capable of 12× optical zoom.

To clarify, today we’re still on the iPhone 14, which features a 3× optical zoom — and the model releasing this fall is rumored to retain the same 3× zoom level, using periscope technology to reduce the camera’s thickness.

The source of Tuesday’s iPhone 16 rumor, Digital Chat Station, previously leaked the iPhone 12 mini display.

Threads is the new social media platform with Twitter-like features, coming from Instagram. As on Twitter, you can make short text posts with a few attached images or video, write replies, quote posts, repost them, etc. But you’re not starting fresh again: You sign in with your Instagram account and instantly access the same network of people who you follow and all your followers.

Since Twitter’s slow-burn downfall began last year, a few hot new replacements have been propped up, with varying degrees of staying power. Mastodon is the open-source, volunteer-driven network that courted the nerdy types in the tech community — but no one else. Bluesky, backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has been scaling slowly on an invitation system. Post, T2 and countless others were the fashion of the day but burned out fast.

Threads has three great things going for it: It’s incredibly easy to join, it’s built off your existing network of friends, and it’s very simple to use. If you liked Twitter, you’ll like Threads. While I don’t like Threads as much as Mastodon, its future interoperability with the open-source alternative means we can all be happy on whatever service we choose and stay in touch.

So many games on the App Store are thinly veiled vessels for sucking away your money through in-app purchases, a problem that Apple is both the cause of and solution to. Today, I’m going to give you my five favorite non-spammy games for iPhone. They’re all highly addictive time-killers.

All of these games are devoid of manipulative game mechanics, pay-to-win schemes and scummy in-app purchases. They’re all free, included in a $4.99-a-month Apple Arcade subscription, or very cheap to buy. I don’t make a lot of time to play video games, so I’m certainly not going to waste time on a game that doesn’t respect me as a player.

The first screenshots and videos of apps being built for Vision Pro show just how easy it is to port iOS apps to Apple’s upcoming augmented reality headset.

Apple just released the visionOS software development kit last Wednesday, and already people are refitting their iPhone apps for Apple’s new mixed-reality platform and sharing the results online.

The apps include Broadcasts, which lets you tune in to internet radio and livestreams — and leave a little Now Playing window anywhere in your virtual space. With cooking app Crouton in visionOS, you can place timers all around your kitchen. And Tasks, a powerful to-do app, works exactly as it does on your Mac and iPhone.

In my opinion, this is what will ultimately make visionOS succeed where similar mixed-reality platforms failed: It builds heavily on the same technologies that underpin iOS. If you can build an iPhone app, you can build a Vision Pro app.

Here’s a gallery of what some popular indie apps look like running on Vision Pro.

iOS 17 has a lot of great headlining features — and many more features Apple didn’t have time to mention during the WWDC23 keynote. Today, I’m going one level deeper: Here are 10 more tweaks and smaller changes that could have a big impact on daily life with your iPhone after you update to iOS 17.

Despite dumping massive engineering resources into its brand-new visionOS platform for the Vision Pro headset, Apple is bringing loads of new features to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and even tvOS this year. Headlining features include NameDrop, StandBy, Journal, Live Stickers, pet tagging in Photos and blurring unsolicited nude pictures.

However, Apple didn’t have time during its jam-packed WWDC23 keynote this week to cover all the new features. Now that iOS 17 is out, here are some of the hidden gems people have discovered in Apple’s latest operating systems.

A stealth announcement at WWDC23 is that Apple has significantly lowered the barrier of entry to port PC games to the Mac. A new Game Porting Toolkit “provides an emulation environment to run your existing, unmodified Windows game,” says Aiswariya Sreenivassan — a GPU, graphics and displays software engineer at Apple.

It’s a big gap to clear, which is why the Mac has been left behind in recent years. PC games are compiled for the Intel x86 architecture that the Mac just finished moving away from. The unified Apple silicon architecture bears little resemblance to the standard gaming PC with discrete graphics cards and memory. Apple’s Metal 3 library is very different from DirectX, Unity, Unreal and Vulkan — the usual suspects across the computing pond.

Apple’s new tools could open the floodgates for Mac ports of popular PC games. According to a game engine programmer I spoke with, the Game Porting Toolkit demo is “really impressive.” If the tools work as well in practice as in Apple’s demo, they “would be incredibly useful,” said the developer, who works for a major game developer and asked to remain anonymous.

How does Apple’s new “spatial computing” platform visionOS work exactly?

At WWDC23 this week, Apple detailed a bunch of interesting tidbits about how the new Vision Pro headset works. Apple detailed how buttons look and behave in the spatial computer, how they are pressed without any physical controls, and how apps work in 3D.

Here’s how Apple’s spatial interface works.

How can you install the watchOS 10 Developer Beta? While the release is months away, you might want to take it for a test drive or see how your apps work in the new release. Right now, you need to make sure you’re signed into your developer Apple ID and that you have developer betas turned on in the Settings app.

These days, the process is far easier. You no longer need to install a beta profile and reboot your watch a bunch of times to get it working.

How can you install the macOS 14 Sonoma Developer Beta? While the release is months away, you might want to take it for a test drive or see how your apps work in the new release. Right now, you need to make sure you’re signed into your developer Apple ID and that you have developer betas turned on in the Settings app.

These days, the process is far easier. You no longer need to install a beta profile and reboot your Mac a bunch of times to get it working.

How can you install the iPadOS 17 Developer Beta? While the release is months away, you might want to take it for a test drive or see how your apps work in the new release. Right now, you need to make sure you’re signed into your developer Apple ID and that you have developer betas turned on in the Settings app.

These days, the process is far easier. You no longer need to install a beta profile and reboot your tablet a bunch of times to get it working.

How can you install the iOS 17 Developer Beta? While the release is months away, you might want to take it for a test drive or see how your apps work in the new release. Right now, you need to make sure you’re signed into your developer Apple ID and that you have developer betas turned on in the Settings app.

These days, the process is far easier. You no longer need to install a beta profile and reboot your phone a bunch of times to get it working.

At today’s Platforms State of the Union, Apple went into more depth on the updates coming to their software: interactive widgets for iOS, iPadOS and now on the macOS desktop; big updates to watchOS; and the introduction of visionOS, the operating system that runs on Apple’s new Vision Pro.

There are loads of new features that developers will be able to take advantage of that Apple didn’t highlight in the main Keynote. Thus far, they’ve covered improvements to the in-app camera, a standard tips balloon, and an easier way to make animations in SwiftUI.

Apple’s long-awaited Vision Pro headset features all of Apple’s apps in a floating, immersive 3D space that’s designed to let wearers interact seamlessly with the real world, rather than walling them off in a virtual one.

“Vision Pro will introduce us to spatial computing,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook during the recorded WWDC23 keynote Monday as he unveiled the pricey device. “This marks the beginning of a journey that will bring a powerful new dimension to personal technology.”

The company described it as “the first Apple product you look through, not at.” Vision Pro starts at $3,499 and will be available early next year.

Apple’s WWDC keynote is the biggest event of the year, kicking off the annual cycle of software updates and changes to every single platform — iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Only a few people buy a new Apple product every year, but everyone has something to look forward to after WWDC. How can you watch it all unfold this Monday?

You can watch the live stream on the web on Apple’s website or on YouTube, inside the free Apple Developer app, on your smart TV, and for a select lucky few, in person — my tips on how to make the most of that and more are all below.