John Brownlee - page 56

Some iOS 7 features Apple didn’t have time to talk about:

• FaceTime audio – you can now make high-quality audio-only calls over FaceTime.

• Activation lock – If a thief wipes a stolen device, guess what? They can’t reactivate that iPhone without the original Apple ID that was used to remotely wipe it.

• Phone, Message and FaceTime blocking – You can block people who just won’t let go. Fantastic!

• Notification Sync – Your notifications now sync across all devices! Yes!

Here’s a major, major new feature for the App Store in iOS 7: your apps will now automatically update themselves to the latest version, no manual updates required.

That’s a feature everyone’s going to love… until they hate it when apps invisibly stop working because something broke between versions, but users didn’t realize it had updated.

The App Store is also getting some new ways of browsing apps: by age, or by apps that are popular in your immediate area. Very cool.

Siri is also getting an upgrade in iOS 7.

For one thing, there’s a new look to the interface. It’s flatter and cleaner, and now you see a soundwave of your voice as you speak. And the results display much more cleanly.

There’s also a new Siri voice. It sounds more natural, and it comes in both male and female varieties. German and French speakers are also getting more natural voices.

Siri understands more system-level commands, too. Play my last voicemail, increase brightness, turn on my Bluetooth! Siri now understands all of these instructions.

Siri can also answer more questions. Siri now interacts with Twitter, Wikipedia, and it even integrates web search results from Bing! Did they ditch Google?

Siri’s also a big part in iOS’s next feature, called “iOS in the Car.” The idea here is that iOS 7 will interact with in-dash displays. It’s an extension of Siri Hands-Free.

Craig Ferenghi just gave us a demo of iOS 7. Here’s what is new about the look and design ethos of iOS 7.

Tim Cook just took the stage to unveil the latest version of iOS, the world’s best-loved mobile operating system. It’s iOS 7, a redesigned operating system for a new generation of mobile users who already take the iPhone for granted. And it’s a radical redesign: “the biggest change to iOS 7 since the iPhone.”

There are way too many changes to count here. Jony Ive has made a point that this is a vast simplification and clarification of iOS that was only made possible by a radical collaboration across all departments at Apple.

We’ll delve into more features soon. For right now, enjoy this gallery of iOS 7.

“If you do the math, iOS is the world’s most popular operating system, and number 2 is an Android operating system that was released back in 2010,” says Tim Cook.

Apple just gave developers at WWDC a sneak peek of the next Mac Pro, a revolutionary and radical new design for the next ten years. “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass!” quips Phil Schiller.

It’s a major departure, with a new stealth look. The new Mac Pro is built around a new unified thermal core, with a new generation 12-core Xeon processor. Twice as fast as the previous generation. The memory’s also super charged, 1866MHz DD3 with a 60GBps bandwidth. This is a powerhouse.

To work with Apple’s new 802.11ac MacBooks, Apple is releasing totally redesigned AirPort base stations.

Although the new AirPort is tiny, only 4-inches, it packs a lot of functionality, including 3-stream 802.11ac Wi-Fi, simultaneous dual-band, a beamforming antenna array and the option of either a 2TB or 3TB hard drive.

Price and release haven’t yet been announced, but these look like great updates.

Apple just announced that OS X Mavericks is coming out in a developer preview for today. It will be available to everyone else in fall, presumably for the usual price of $19.99. Stay tuned for our hands-on of Maverick’s new features!

Apple just showed off how Notification Center is getting supercharged in OS X Mavericks.

Now in Mavericks, if your machine is sleeping, you’ll see all the Notifications that came in while you were away, all on the lock screen.

Mavericks will also update your apps in the background. And if you get an iMessage or an email, you can reply right from the Notification.

There’s also apparently a new kind of Notification, where apps can send Push Notifications to iOS devices.

Notification Center was notoriously underbaked in Mountain Lion: it’s nice seeing Mavericks getting this right.

Image: Engadget

There are even more improvements in OS X Mavericks, and the first of them is iCloud Keychain.

Craig Ferenghi says the new iCloud Keychain will keep track of website logins, credit card numbers, and Wi-Fi passwords, synced across iCloud to all your devices.

iCloud Keychain can also generate unique passwords for you, then automatically store them. And since this is all database stuff, it implies iCloud can now handle Core Data… a big failing in iCloud beforehand.

It’s all encrypted, too. Of course, with data vulnerabilities at an all-time high, whether you want to use iCloud Keychain might depend on how paranoid you were.

Craig Ferenghi just announced some features OS X 10.9 Mavericks:

• Finder Tabs. No more having a thousand Finder windows open. Now it’ll work like Safari with one tab for every Finder instance. You can

• Tagging. You can now tag files to make it easier to find files you need. These tags exist almost as smart folders in Finder, and you can easily tag files by either entering the text you want to tag it with, or drag them into your tag folder. Looks like Apple has finally given up on hiding the file system on OS X.

• Multiple Displays. Finally, proper multiple display support! Going full screen on one display won’t blank out your other display. And you can pan Spaces on each display individually. You can easily open apps on whatever display you want, have more than one app fullscreen at once (dragging assets between apps) or keep one display static with pinned apps (like a Dashboard) while you work dynamically on the other one. You will also be able to use your Apple TV as a second display over AirPlay.

Tim Cook points out the obvious: everyone on a Mac upgraded to Mountain Lion within a year, while no one is even bothering with Windows 8. A chart tells a thousand words, huh?

Tim Cook just did something odd: he allowed another company to take the stage right off the bat to explain cool things people can do with iOS devices, artificial intelligence and robotics.

Boris Sofman, founder of ANKI, showed off ANKI Drive, remote control cars that connect to your iPhone via Bluetooth 4.0 and can drive themselves around a course while automatically detecting the other drivers, motions of the track, etc.

Kind of like Google’s self-driving cars, but for children. The reaction from the audience wasn’t that great, and the demo sort of failed, but you can see the possibility: iOS devices acting as the brains for real life robots.

It’s a small, fun demo, but it’s more about the possibilities here. Everything you love about video games imbued in real objects, or artificial intelligences being powered by iPhones.

It’s not a big deal, but in a human touch, Tim Cook just acknowledged the difficulties Apple had accomodating all the developers who wanted to go to WWDC 2013 this year.

“We apologize for not being able to have more developers here,” Tim Cook said. “This is the largest venue we can hold WWDC in.”

This is a nice nod to the controversy that erupted after Apple’s WWDC 2013 tickets sold out after just two minutes this year. Of course, the biggest issue isn’t just capacity: Apple’s ticketing system fell over in demand this year. But it’s still nice to hear Tim Cook acknowledge the difficulty so many developers have had getting to WWDC.

Let’s hope they manage better next year. In the meantime, Apple is posting all of its conferences online.

To rousing applause, Tim Cook has just taken the stage at the 2013 Worldwide Developer’s Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Today, Tim Cook is expected to unveil Apple’s new streaming music service, iRadio, along with iOS 7 and OS X 10.9. In addition, we’re expecting new MacBooks, a radically redesigned iOS experience courtesy of Jony Ive, and possibly new Mac Pros.

This year, Apple kicked off the WWDC keynote with something different: a video presentation expressing Apple’s design ethos. It was very pretty, and forecasts some radical changes to iOS and OS X 10.9.

We can’t see what’s coming next. But first, the obligatory numbers.

We’ve been hearing a ton of leaks and details about Apple’s new iRadio streaming music service lately, enough to get a complete picture of the Pandora-like service, which will not only serve up a streaming music station of music you’ll like based upon your iTunes collection, but allow you to buy any tracks you hear with a single tap. And it’ll all be supported by iAds.

All the music labels are reportedly on board, and so we should hear Tim Cook announce the service in just a few hours. But in case there was any doubt, the Wall Street Journal is now weighing in, confirming that iRadio is a go.

For the past year, Apple’s head of design Jony Ive has reportedly been taking a hatchet to the skeuomorphic design principles of iOS. When iOS 7 is announced later today, it is widely expected that he will show us a much more modern-looking operating system, one emboldened by what is widely called a ‘flat’ design aesthetic.

But let’s keep a little bit of perspective here. Jony Ive isn’t completely overhauling iOS 7 because of some petulant, blind hatred for skeuomorphism. He’s doing so because he’s a pro, and skeuomorphism is solving a problem that iOS no longer has: how to teach people to use devices that, a mere six years ago, seemed impossibly futuristic and sci-fi-like!

Two months ago, Verizon announced that it wouldn’t allow customers to upgrade their iPhones early after twenty months anymore. It was a pretty hostile move: the subsidy you’ve paid for your iPhone has been paid off after twenty months, so Verizon was effectively saying that their new policy was to bleed you dry for an additional four months, no exceptions.

When we wrote about Verizon’s move, we said “And what Verizon tends to do, AT&T can usually be expected to follow. How long until AT&T ends 20 month eligibility for early upgrades too?”

The answer, as it turns out, is a little under two months.

Today’s WWDC, and at the very least, we’re expecting new Macbooks based off of Intel’s new Haswell processors. But whither iMac, and when will Apple’s line of desktops be upgraded? It looks like Haswell-based iMacs could be announced today as well.

Yesterday, The Washington Post broke the story that the NSA, according to a leaked presentation, is “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies” to collect information on users, including e-mail, chat, photos, videos, and social network details. Basically everything, in other words.

The program is called PRISM and Apple is one of the many companies that a leaked presentation notablyclaims is involved.

Apple is denying that they have participated in PRISM, or even heard about it. That would seemingly end matters, except for one thing: even if Apple was part of PRISM, they would be required by law not to admit it if asked.

Arrrr! Avast, ye scurrilous sea quims! Why are you even reading this? Go download Scurvy Scallywags right now! It’s hilarious, addictive, cheap and the best game to come to iOS in recent memory.

We’ve been hearing reports for weeks now that Apple has been slowly signing deals with the three major music publishers to launch their new streaming music service, iRadio. There was just one conspicuous holdout. Sony. But now, the deal has been inked.

Casemakers are known to gamble on upcoming iOS product launches. Every day they can have their product on the shelves closer to launch is a day they have a leg up over their competitors in the hyper-competitive case market.

Case in point, here’s a story about Hard Candy Cases gambled (and lost) $50,000 on iPhone 4S moldings from China to get their cases first-to-market. When the iPhone 4S actually debuted, though, it looked identical to the 4, instead of the radical redesign the case makers expected. Oops.

Now the same case maker is doing the same thing, gambling on the iPad 5 launch. This time, though, Tim Hickman has less to lose.

https://youtu.be/2Azoteu5nzs

I am a snorer. This should not be taken to mean that I make soft, puppy-like growling sounds in the back of my throat as I sleep. In fact, if you happened to hold that puppy up within six inches of my face while I sawed logs, it is likely that all of the flesh, fur and musculature of that baby dog would be vortexed off its skeleton only to become lodged in the yawning chasms of my throat and nostrils. My snore is the sound of the Seventh Seal being opened, or the universe tearing itself asunder. In all probability? You have never heard anything like me.

So imagine my poor girlfriend, who sleeps next to me every night as the bed vibrates, the house shakes and the ceiling buckles with my snoring. As you might well imagine, she’s eager for me to do something about my snoring.

And what do you know? There’s a new app for just that. It’s called Snorelab.