D. Griffin Jones - page 21

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.

Throwboy pillows by Roberto Hoyos are a series of soft, squishy pillows that resemble your favorite Apple products. You can decorate your living room with astonishingly accurate facsimiles of the fan favorites — the Macintosh 128k, the iMac G3, the iPod, the iPhone — as well as the cult classics — the Lisa, the iMac G4 and the G4 Cube.

When I say “astonishingly accurate,” I’m not exaggerating. I was blown away by the attention to detail.

In the United States, iMessage is one of the first features iPhone users mention as a benefit over Android. In the rest of the world, nobody cares, because everyone uses WhatsApp and other cross-platform services.

But there are a lot of cool features inside the Messages app these days — we’ve previously covered how to edit and unsend messages and share your screen. Here are five more hidden features inside Apple’s messaging app. Keep reading or watch the video below.

Humane, the hot Silicon Valley startup that’s been drumming up interest in its secretive product recently, finally showed the world what its A-list talent has been working on. In a TED talk released on Tuesday, Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri unveiled a small, screenless, badge-like device that the company hopes will replace the smartphone.

Humane is  a buzzy startup that’s raised more than $230 million from investors and has hired a lot of ex-Apple talent. It’s estimated 50% of the company’s 200 employees are from Apple. Chaudhri was one of the lead designers of the original iPhone, and contributed to dozens of Apple’s biggest products (the Mac, iPod, Apple TV, Apple Watch, AirPods and HomePod). His name is on thousands of patents. He met his wife, Humane co-founder Bethany Bongiorno, at Apple. And they hired Ken Kocienda, who literally wrote the book on Apple’s creative process.

I’m laying out their credentials here at the top because it is remarkable to me how such a team could miss the mark by such an incredible margin. Humane’s badge thing cannot and will not replace your iPhone, no matter how hard Chaudhri wishes that to be the case.

You can use a free Mac app called LocationSimulator to hide your real location on your iPhone. It works great as a Pokémon Go spoofer. Just set it up, then plug your phone into a Mac and tell it where you want to “be.” You don’t need to jailbreak your phone or install anything on it.

When using LocationSimulator, every app on your iPhone will use this new GPS location. It’s useful for maintaining privacy — for instance, if you’re posting screenshots online, it’ll mask your real home address. Developers can use it, too, for testing location features in their apps.

Best of all, you just need a Mac. LocationSimulator is free and open-source.

Taking a moment to add an extra passcode to your iCloud account might save your skin if your iPhone is ever stolen by a shady character who’s eyeing you like a hawk. By default, your iPhone passcode is all someone needs to lock you out of your devices and wreak financial havoc on your life. And it’s not that difficult to capture your passcode if you tap into your phone in a public place.

In fact, a recent spate of coordinated scams have played out like this: A spy watches for anyone entering their iPhone passcode in a bar or other public place. Then, the device is yoinked out of the victim’s hands. And before they can do anything, they find themselves locked out of their own iCloud account. Soon, the criminals who stole the iPhone proceed to make unauthorized purchases, empty bank accounts and generally wreak havoc on the victim’s finances and personal life.

Luckily, setting up a second passcode just for iCloud can protect you from this type of criminal operation. I’ll show you how to keep these thieves at bay — and offer some additional advice for keeping your account secure.

How does Tim Cook customize his Apple Watch face? During his recent tour of India, people zoomed in on this picture of him meeting with developers to dissect his choice of watch face and complications.

I’ll break down Cook’s watch and show you how to download it yourself.

After all, the Apple Watch is celebrating eight years since its release on this very day in 2015. What better way to mark the occasion than with a celebratory new watch face?

If you’re the right kind of person, the Untitled Folder Wallet by Nik Bentel is handy and practical while doubling as a funny visual joke. It’s a premium leather wallet that happens to look exactly like the New Folder icon in macOS.

It has three pockets for carrying cards, cash and coins. The leather is soft and the stitching holds strong. And best of all, it’s shaped like a tiny folder.

It’s a limited-run item of only 500 units, so if you want one, you’d best order now. I’ve been using it for about a week. Surprisingly, I fell in love with it.

It might not be apparent at first, but Apple’s Photos app gives you plenty of ways to manage your photo library and tweak the images in it.

If you have tens of thousands of photos like I do, your photo library is probably a big mess. You could spend hundreds of hours meticulously sorting images into albums, and tweaking settings to get everything just right. Or you can use some of the features Apple offers to make things easy.

I’ve already covered my top tips for taking photos. Here are my top five tips for managing and manipulating the great photos you took, using tools in Apple’s Photos app.

If you lived in the United States in the last 15 years and you used Facebook, you can fill out a brief form and claim your part of a $725 million privacy settlement. This marks the end of a class-action lawsuit wherein the company admitted that U.K. data mining company Cambridge Analytica accessed Facebook users’ data without their consent.

You have until Friday, August 25, to file a claim. It only takes a few minutes. How much you get depends on how many people take the payment — it could be as low as $1.50 if every person in the United States fills it out.

Making a claim also stops you from pursuing a separate claim against Meta, Facebook’s parent company. However, if you take no action, you won’t get anything as a result of the Facebook data scandal.

Is it possible to get work done on an Apple silicon Mac without ever installing Rosetta 2, the compatibility layer for running old Intel apps? In short, yes.

After buying my first Apple silicon Mac earlier this year, I was curious if I could get settled into my new computer without Rosetta. And I was successful. I’ve been writing articles, making videos and recording podcasts for more than a month, and I haven’t yet come across a mission-critical app that’s Intel-exclusive.

Whether you’re just learning how to code, you’re studying computer science or you’re a well-seasoned Mac developer, these three apps are sure to help you in your work. I have an app that adds a whole slew of new features to the Xcode Simulator, one that makes it easier managing packages in Homebrew and a better way to download and install Xcode.

All of these tools are, themselves, open source. There are links to each GitHub repo where you can learn from them and compile them yourself.

MacWhisper is a great way to get text transcriptions for podcasts, live streams, meetings, videos — whatever you may need. Just drag a file onto the Mac app’s window and you’ll get a transcription generated on the fly. You can even use the microphone to make transcriptions live as you’re talking.

You can easily edit the transcription like a Word document and export it as a subtitle file for a video, a text file for reference or an HTML file for publishing online.

The new Mac mini is the best value in the entire computer industry, point blank. It’s a $700 computer that won’t break a sweat editing high-resolution video, exhaustively long podcasts or giant graphic design projects — all at the same time. The M2 Pro model takes it even further.

Because of my job here at Cult of Mac, I wear a lot of hats. In a typical week, I edit videos, record a podcast, dabble in graphic design, compile open-source projects in Xcode and research topics for my writing. I’m basically all the creative professional stereotypes Apple loves to put in their promotional videos rolled into one.

After living with the new Mac mini for over a month, I can confidently say this is a fantastically powerful machine within the reach of independent creators, small businesses and schools.

A utilitarian and professional-looking keyboard by day, the 3inus Kebohub EE01 turns into a light show for streaming Fall Guys or whatever on Twitch by night.  Live now on Kickstarter, it’s a full RGB-backlit customizable mechanical keyboard with a handy-dandy hub for your USB accessories and HDMI display.

To put it in car terms, it’s like the BMW X5 M, a practical, midsize luxury SUV that’s also trying to be a performance car. Or, in a less generous metaphor, a mullet.

I’ve had a few weeks with the Kebohub EE01; here’s why it’s a good mechanical keyboard plus a good desktop dock for a MacBook.

There’s much more to iCloud Keychain than meets the eye. Apple’s password-management system suggests strong passwords, autofills them whenever you need to sign in later, and syncs across all your devices. But you also can use iCloud Keychain to keep two-factor authentication codes (instead of relying on Google Authenticator) and access your passwords on Windows.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about how Apple should make a standalone Passwords app. That’s because a lot of the more advanced features in iCloud Keychain are pretty hard to find. You have to dig into Settings to locate them.

There’s a workaround: I have a Shortcut that will add a convenient Passwords icon to your iPhone’s Home Screen. Using iCloud Keychain becomes a lot easier.

5 Movies, likely the first iPhone app generated almost entirely by ChatGPT, was approved by Apple and published on the App Store late Thursday night.

Morten Just, an independent developer of Mac apps who’s based in Switzerland, guided ChatGPT through the creation of the movie-recommendation app. Just said he told the AI what he wanted, then pasted its output into an Xcode project, writing only an estimated 2% to 5% of the code himself. The chatbot even fixed bugs as Just pasted in error messages.

“What matters to me is creating software that is useful and solves real problems,” Just told Cult of Mac after his 5 Movies app went live. “If I can do that faster with AI, I will.”

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

Swiss developer Morten Just has built a whole slew of useful Mac apps under the name Otato. But his latest app wasn’t made by him at all: He asked ChatGPT to build it for him.

While Just earned his stripes as a professional programmer, he didn’t write a single line of code to create 5 Movies. It’s an iPhone app that gives you five daily movie recommendations, shows you the trailers on YouTube and tells you where you can stream the films. (It’s currently pending App Store approval.)

These days, artificial intelligence is making headlines for giving users powerful tools that can write essays, recreate impressive art and give technology journalists the heebie-jeebies. 5 Movies is proof that, with a big assist from AI, it only takes a few prompts and a basic understanding of Xcode to create an iPhone app without any coding yourself.

When I interviewed Morten earlier this week for Cult of Mac, I asked him how he got ChatGPT to build his app, what the generated code looked like, and how AI-coded apps will impact ordinary people as well as software developers.

Season three of Ted Lasso arrived today — but you might need a refresher on where the most critically acclaimed show on Apple TV+ left off. Here’s a quick summary of the first two seasons.

I recorded two conversations with aspiring film critic and personal friend, Russell Davis, discussing the plot points and themes of seasons one and two. You can watch these videos below to catch yourself up for today’s premiere.

I’m going to show you five ways you can instantly boost your productivity on your Mac. You might not have thought your Mac was capable of these advanced features. But in my opinion, the Mac’s reputation for being un-customizable is misunderstood. Four of these tips depend on third-party productivity apps that will add radical new system features to your Mac.

I’ll show you how to get instant window snapping on the Mac, powerful screenshot and recording tools, a clever clipboard manager that should be built into macOS, a simple tip for opening apps faster, and a smart time-tracking tool that’ll keep you productive.

Last week, I wrote a story incorrectly concluding that a full Linux desktop environment would soon run on Macs with Apple silicon. This was a misunderstanding of the facts.

While some of the work in the Asahi Linux project has been worked into Linux Kernel 6.2, and while Linux 6.2 will be adopted by the next major versions of Ubuntu and Fedora, this does not mean that Apple silicon Macs will be able to boot into these desktop environments.

The CultCast host Erfon Elijah finally got our hands on the coveted HomePod 2 speakers. He put the 2023 model head-to-head with the 2018 model the way it’s meant to be enjoyed: in a stereo pair.

The new HomePod comes loaded with new features: smart home connectivity, a brighter top panel, a U1 chip, temperature and humidity sensors … but the big question is, how does it sound?

People never thought it would happen. People didn’t think it was possible. But in an update to Windows 11, you will be able to send and receive iMessages and manage your notifications through a PC.

This update comes through the Windows Insider program, which offers users prerelease versions of the desktop operating system for beta testing and software development. Microsoft ships updates to Windows annually in the fall, so this feature may arrive for everyone later this year.

After a long wait, Pokémon Sleep will finally become a reality this summer. The game will combine sleep tracking with the enduringly popular collect-a-thon game series. And, while the smash-hit mobile game Pokémon Go promotes outdoor exercise, Pokémon Sleep will reward users for getting a full night of shut-eye.

The game, for iPhone and Android devices, is being developed by Japanese game studio Select Button in partnership with Niantic, the developer of Pokémon Go.

I have four top tips for Mastodon users after spending a few months on the hot new social media platform. There’s a healthy community of Apple writers, developers, creators and fans — even Phil Schiller — who have all jumped ship from Twitter.

I’ve previously written a detailed guide to getting started. I’ll start with some brief advice on picking an instance and move on to the pro tips I’ve picked up.