Ryan Christoffel

984 posts on MacStories since November 2016

Ryan is an editor for MacStories and co-hosts the [Adapt](https://www.relay.fm/adapt) podcast on Relay FM. He most commonly works and plays on his iPad Pro and bears no regrets about moving on from the Mac. He and his wife live in New York City.
ryan@macstories.net

Pokémon GO’s ARKit-Powered Release Coming Soon

The most well-known augmented reality smartphone game will soon be better than ever. As was previously announced at WWDC, Pokémon GO is adopting Apple’s ARKit framework to provide a more true-to-life AR experience. The Pokémon GO website announced that this update, featuring what the post dubs ‘AR+’, is launching very soon.

AR+ will not only make Pokémon appear more accurately in space, but it also brings enhancements to actual gameplay. Because the game will be able to better measure distance and placement of objects, each Pokémon found in the wild will now have an awareness meter. The meter fills up as Pokémon grow more aware of your looming presence, and if the meter fills up completely, the Pokémon will run away. But if you sneak up carefully, not only will you prevent the Pokémon from fleeing, but you’ll earn some nice perks: an Expert Handler bonus that increases the amount of XP and Stardust you receive, and a better chance at earning Great and Excellent Throw bonuses. These additions are a clever way of using ARKit to not only improve the realism of the game’s visuals, but its mechanics too.

One either nice perk of AR+ is that, as a side benefit of being fixed to a precise point in space, Pokémon will display in an accurate scale, so you can walk up and see just how big or small a Pokémon truly is.

While Pokémon GO’s days as a worldwide phenomenon are over (at least for now), the game continues to receive important updates, and the adoption of ARKit appears to be a key one. The update’s exact release timeline is unclear, but by all indications it’s imminent.

Apple Shares Differential Privacy Insights for Emoji and QuickType Keyboard→

In the most recent issue of Apple’s Machine Learning Journal, titled “Learning with Privacy at Scale,” the team working on differential privacy shares details on exactly how its systems work. While much of the article is highly technical in nature, it concludes by sharing results from several real-life applications. Regarding emoji:

The data shows many differences across keyboard locales. In Figure 6, we observe snapshots from two locales: English and French. Using this data, we can improve our predictive emoji QuickType across locales.

The referenced chart is featured above, showing the popularity of certain emoji in different parts of the world.

The results regarding QuickType words aren’t presented in a chart, but the article does mention words in several specific categories that Apple has been able to learn about thanks to differential privacy.

The learned words for the English keyboard, for example, can be divided into multiple categories: abbreviations like wyd, wbu, idc; popular expressions like bruh, hun, bae, and tryna, seasonal or trending words like Mayweather, McGregor, Despacito, Moana, and Leia; and foreign words like dia, queso, aqui, and jai. Using the data, we are constantly updating our on-device lexicons to improve the keyboard experience.

Another category of words discovered are known words without the trailing e (lov or th) or w (kno). If users accidentally press the left-most prediction cell above the keyboard, which contains the literal string typed thus far, a space will be added to their current word instead of the character they intended to type. This is a key insight that we were able to learn due to our local differentially private algorithm.

Though the article doesn’t mention it, presumably the latter example of accidentally-tapped QuickType suggestions might lead to Apple adjusting sensitivity for its touch targets related to the ‘e’ button and the left-most prediction cell. It’s interesting to consider what other unexpected lessons may be learned from differential privacy data.

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Apple Releases iOS 11.2 with Apple Pay for iMessage, Fix for Notification Bug, and More

Today in an unusual weekend launch, Apple released iOS 11.2 to the public. The hallmark feature for US users is Apple Pay for iMessage, but that service reportedly won’t go live until at least Monday. The reason the update launched today is that current versions of iOS contains a bug that may crash springboard on December 2nd – as users all over the world are now discovering – and 11.2 contains the fix for that bug.

https://twitter.com/reneritchie/status/936826338496806912

Apple has published a support article where they urge users encountering the issue to follow steps to disable notifications in order to stop the crashes, then update to iOS 11.2 before turning notifications back on.

Besides the bug fix, iOS 11.2 includes the aforementioned Apple Pay for iMessage for US users, new wallpaper options for iPhone X users, and a handful of other minor improvements.

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CARROT Weather Adds Powerful, Redesigned Apple Watch App

Version 4.3 of CARROT Weather for iOS launched today, bringing a ground-up redesign of its Apple Watch app that offers power and flexibility in a beautifully designed package.

CARROT Weather’s story isn’t that it had an old, out-dated Apple Watch app that’s now finally become modern. Instead, today’s update takes what was already a very good Watch app and replaces it with a great one.

Before this big redesign, CARROT’s Watch app was already fast and flexible, with an assortment of customization options for things like complications. It even worked well when your Watch was running solo; by contrast, most third-party Watch apps depend entirely on a paired iPhone and can’t function at all when untethered from the device. CARROT’s new Watch app keeps all these positives, improves upon them, and adds a lot more to the package.

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