Yesterday I made a quick appointment to try on the Apple Watch and have a look at the new MacBook at the nearest Apple Store. It was no problem to get an appointment on the same day. Simply select a time that you want and head in.
David Pierce for Wired:
Our phones have become invasive. But what if you could engineer a reverse state of being? What if you could make a device that you wouldn’t—couldn’t—use for hours at a time? What if you could create a device that could filter out all the bullshit and instead only serve you truly important information? You could change modern life. And so after three-plus decades of building devices that grab and hold our attention—the longer the better—Apple has decided that the way forward is to fight back.
Great article that reveals some history of the upcoming Apple Watch. And what it must have felt like to be Kevin Lynch that first day, coming to Apple, not knowing what you’ll be working on and then to find out the project you’re running is behind schedule:
As soon as he [Kevin Lynch] walked into the studio, he found out the project he’d been hired to run was already on deadline. In fact, it was behind schedule. There was a design review in two days, he was told, with the Apple brass. Lynch had better be ready.
John Gruber on Daring Fireball:
I don’t know what it’s going to cost. But if you think it’s going to cost $1,000 or less, you’re the one who’s off your rocker.
Let’s just assume it’s unlikely that the Apple Watch Edition is going to cost less than $5,000 US. And if it turns out to be a steal at a $1,000, you can have your party then.
After removing mentions about its upcoming Photos app for OS X a few days ago, Apple today published a new website detailing the new features in the iPhoto (and Aperture) replacement. While the beta version for OS X 10.10.3 – which includes Photos – is available for testers only, Apple also made the new app available to some select news sites:
The app itself felt stable and looks a lot like an scaled up version of the iOS 8 Photos app. It works the same way when navigating between Photos, Shared Photos and Albums. The Photos view also has the same model of drilling down from a yearly overview, to location and date based automated photo groups.
One big gripe is the iCloud data storage used if you want to sync photos between your Mac and iOS devices. This requires a lot of space and Apple only gives you 5 GB, which is shared not only with the photos you want to upload but also iOS backups, iCloud mail and all apps that use iCloud to store anything online in Apple’s cloud service.
Apple offers a variety of upgraded storage options (from 20 GB for $0.99/month to 1 TB at $19.99/month) but that doesn’t take away from making 5 GB feel like it’s 2008. Sharing that little amount of free storage across multiple iOS devices gets tight quick.
It’d be a different story if Apple would give you 5 GB per active device. So if you had a Mac, iPhone and iPad using the same iCloud account, you’ll get a total of 15 GB for free.
When it comes to the actual editing Photos seems to be a mix of iPhoto and Aperture, while definitely aimed at users of the former. It’s not a professional app like Aperture, let alone Lightroom. If you’re looking for anything more that simple editing features, Adobe’s Lightroom is the place to look at. For regular users iPhoto should be more than enough though. It’s certainly possible that Apple could add more features over time like it did with Final Cut Pro X after it was released and everybody got up in arms over its missing features that were part of Final Cut Pro 7 before.
Photos should be a welcome update, coming some time later this spring, most likely with the release of OS X 10.10.3 which it was bundled with in today’s developer release.
Sarah Frier writing for Bloomberg:
In the first half of this year, tweets will start to be visible in Google’s search results as soon as they’re posted, thanks to a deal giving the Web company access to Twitter’s firehose, the stream of data generated by the microblogging service’s 284 million users, people with knowledge of the matter said Wednesday. Google previously had to crawl Twitter’s site for the information, which will now come automatically from Twitter.
After capping access to the full stream a couple of years ago, Twitter apparently is opening up again. Wondering if other companies will get the same access Google does.
Blake Ross Uber.gov – It’s Time to Let the Government Drive:
There are two main routes to get from the Vegas airport to the Strip. One of them is illegal. To figure out which one you’re on, apply this test: Look outside. If you can’t find outside, you’re in a tunnel—which means you’re being ripped off.
The I-215 tunnel adds about $10 to your fare, but one in three cabbies “longhauled” undercover cops through it anyway. The country hasn’t seen this kind of brazenness since Bankerty Robberson opened a Skimask Hut outside Wells Fargo in 1979.
What can possibly be done about such a confounding crime? I had plenty of time to research this on a recent trip to Vegas, while my own cabbie, Mickey, drove me to the Bellagio by way of Montpelier, Vermont.
Don’t miss out the plans that Nevada officials and the Nevada Taxicab Authority tried to solve this issue. Yes, it includes BAPS1 and PDFs.
Tim Cook on Bloomberg Businessweek:
While I have never denied my sexuality, I haven’t publicly acknowledged it either, until now. So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.
[..]
I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others. So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.
[..]
We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.
Sarah Perez writing for TechCrunch:
Within the last 36 hours, MCX says it learned that unauthorized third parties obtained the email addresses of some of its CurrentC pilot program participants and other individuals who had expressed interest in the app.
and
At this time, it appears that only the emails of these early mobile app testers have been stolen, which is not as significant a data breach as having payment data or other personal information taken, like home addresses or phone numbers, has been the case with other large-scale data breaches, like the one which took place over the last holiday season at Target.
They don’t know yet how the hackers got the data, but it appears that it was more than a phishing scheme, because the data for dummy accounts was also gathered.
{% tweet https://twitter.com/panzer/status/527489058189377536 %}
I have a feeling this project will soon be forgotten.
Kirk Lennon has a great summary on how Apple Pay works and why we should start using it immediately. He ends his article with one of the objections to Apple’s new payment service:
One of the objections I’ve seen to Apple Pay is “How is it faster/easier than just sliding my card?” The truth is, it isn’t always. It’s rarely going to take longer than sliding a card, but it’s not always going to radically faster either. However, it is much, much more secure. Merchants simply can’t be trusted with your card number, and the only real solution is to never give it to them. Apple Pay solves that, and it does so in a way that embraces industry standards and is easy and maybe even a little bit fun.
There are still unknowns about how Apple Pay works in the background. But it’s certain that merchants don’t get access to your personal information, unlike the not-yet-launched competitor CurrentC, that is gathering all sorts of details about the customer along with a cumbersome payment process that includes crappy old robot barf.
Nick Arnott writing for iMore has posted an in-depth look at CurrentC that has yet to launch publicly but is available for download from Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. During his inspection that included sniffing the data that goes between your phone and the online service, he found a slew of possible fields to be used to transmit personal data and also a lack of authentication that would protect the CurrentC API.
Now, I have to stress here, I never got CurrentC to return me a real user’s data. However, the fact that these fields exist is a good indicator that CurrentC plans to collect this data, and also why on Earth would you ever return these fields without any sort of authentication first? I never hit on an email that appeared to be a valid account, but I was honestly too nervous to keep trying given the data it seemed eager to send back.
He ends his article with this:
With CurrentC, you’re not the customer — you’re the product being sold.