Apple’s had a rough week, Myke’s office is full of assistants and Federico is back with a new task manager and an iPhone X review.
On this week’s episode of Connected, I cover the other half of my experience with Things, and we discuss my iPhone X story. You can listen here.
Sponsored by:
Unicode last night announced the beta version of next year’s emoji release.
This beta release marks one step closer to toward a softball emoji, as well as a cupcake, redheads, bagel or kangaroo. If they make the final cut, that is.
Other emoji candidates in the beta include a teddy bear, mango, party face, skateboard, and spool of thread.
Unfortunately, the proposed emoji that caused a controversy within the Unicode Consortium – the frowning pile of poo – didn’t make the cut for next year. The list isn’t finalized yet (it’ll be in early 2018), but I already see the party face emoji as a potential new favorite.
Also worth noting: there’s a proposal to add support for changing the direction of emoji. If accepted, I wonder if Apple could add a “direction picker” to the existing emoji skin tone menu.
Two important updates to Instagram’s Stories feature announced today – here’s Casey Newton, writing at The Verge:
Instagram is rolling out a private archive of the ephemeral stories you have posted in the app. Starting today, Instagram will begin to add your expired stories to the archive feature, which until now has been used only to house photos and videos you no longer want to display on your public profile. The stories archive, which you will be able to opt out of, is being introduced globally on Android and iOS.
The stories archive represents another feature copied from Snapchat, which introduced its own version of the archive, called Memories, last year. But the archive differs from Snap’s version in one key respect: Instagram will let you post old stories to your profile in a feature the company is calling Highlights. You’ll be able to package old stories together in the archive, give them a name, and share them to your profile, where they will appear above your other posts.
I don’t use Instagram Stories as frequently as my friends (all their social updates start via Stories these days), but with an automatic archive feature combined with Highlights, it may be time for me to start posting puppy videos more often.
On this week’s episode of AppStories, we pick two apps we’ve been experimenting with recently and discuss how it’s going so far. In this installment of Pick 2, John covers macOS image editor Pixelmator Pro, which was released last week, and Federico explains how he’s integrated Things 3 for iOS into recent projects.
Sponsored by:
Myke returns with many comments about last week’s show and a surprise Black Friday purchase. Meanwhile, Stephen has installed Windows 10.
I wasn’t on the show this week, but I enjoyed the discussion about voice assistants and icons for professional task managers, among other topics. You can listen here.
Sponsored by:
Yesterday a serious security flaw in macOS High Sierra was discovered that let someone with access to a Mac running Apple’s latest OS gain root access to the its data. Today, Apple released Security Update 2017-001, which fixes the issue. The release notes to the update describe the issue as follows:
Impact: An attacker may be able to bypass administrator authentication without supplying the administrator’s password
Description: A logic error existed in the validation of credentials. This was addressed with improved credential validation.
In a comment to Rene Ritchie of iMore.com, Apple said:
https://twitter.com/reneritchie/status/935909201821478914
Needless to say, this is an important update that should be installed as soon as possible.
Greg Barbosa, writing for 9to5Mac:
A newly discovered macOS High Sierra flaw is potentially leaving your personal data at risk. Developer Lemi Orhan Ergin publicly contacted Apple Support to ask about the vulnerability he discovered. In the vulnerability he found, someone with physical access to a macOS machine can access and change personal files on the system without needing any admin credentials.
Users who haven’t disabled guest user account access or changed their root passwords (likely most) are currently open to this vulnerability. We’ve included instructions on how to protect yourself in the meantime until an official fix from Apple is released.
Incredibly embarrassing and dangerous screwup for a company as devoted to security as Apple. They’re working on a fix, and in the meantime you should follow these steps to change your root password (thankfully, I had guest user access disabled, so the bug didn’t affect my machine).
See also: Rene Ritchie’s explainer.
A cautionary tale by Serenity Caldwell on smart home devices and having physical backups:
Two days after I installed my latest smart lock experiment, I jokingly said to my husband “We’re going to be in trouble if our internet goes down. I don’t know where the key is to this lock anymore.”
“Worst case, we’ll get our parkour on and break a window,” he responded.
As I sit at my kitchen table writing this story after having to crawl through said window, I find his reply far less funny.
I’d like the moral of the story I’m about to tell you to be “Don’t joke about things you don’t want to happen.” In reality, it is this: Your smart home devices can fail or make mistakes, and when they do, you better have an alternative.
I locked myself out of my apartment a couple of times (I’m terrible at remembering keys), but we have no smart locks installed. While the idea of Siri unlocking the door for me is tempting, I’m afraid I’d end up in a worse situation than Serenity somehow.
Fair and balanced take on the iPhone’s Portrait mode by Khoi Vinh, who generally prefers a DSLR to capture special moments:
More to the point, quibbling over the finer points of photographic effects is somewhat (though not entirely) pointless. What really matters here is that there will be tens if not hundreds of millions of these cameras in the hands of countless people everywhere before too long, and those people will take billions of pictures with them. Only a vanishingly small number of these people will ever object to the details I’ve listed here; most will be incredibly pleased with how portrait mode performs and will share the fruits of their labors avidly.
Just on the merits of sheer volume alone, portrait mode will become a part of our collective visual vocabulary.
