Posts in news

Apple Highlights World Cup Coverage Across a Variety of Apps and Services

Football fans know that the World Cup kicks off later this week, and ahead of that event Apple today shared a press release highlighting how it plans to cover the event using a host of its services and apps. World Cup support will include the following:

  • Siri knowledge of football-related queries is expanding to nine new countries: Brazil, Russia, Denmark, Finland, Malaysia, Turkey, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and Israel.
  • The App Store’s Today tab will see special stories over the next month related to the World Cup, featuring apps from football stars and more.
  • The TV app can be used to not only watch the games, but also track them easily from the Sports tab.
  • Apple News will feature special coverage to keep users up-to-date on the latest World Cup stories.
  • Each of the 32 nations represented in the World Cup will have its own special playlist in Apple Music, highlighting artists from each respective country.
  • Apple Podcasts and iBooks will each showcase a new ‘The Beautiful Game’ collection, with shows and books all about football.
  • Finally, Apple’s video app Clips will get in on the action too, thanks to a recent update that added football-themed content.

While I’m not a football fan (unless we’re talking American football), Apple’s World Cup coverage is exciting to me simply because it shows the potential for future integrated efforts around topics I do care about.

As Apple moves deeper into focusing not just on tech, but on media as well, it will have an increasing number of opportunities to use its apps and services to supplement a user’s experience of big events, such as other major sporting events, election seasons, and more. Applying the Apple ecosystem’s unified media and editorial services to the area of pop culture may seem like a small move, but it could become a product differentiator that users grow to love.

macOS Mojave: A Roundup of All the Little Things

Now that people have had a chance to dig deeper into macOS Mojave, a number of smaller features have been discovered that didn’t get mentioned during the keynote on Monday and weren’t included in our initial overview of the updated OS that will be released in the fall. Here are a few of our favorite discoveries:

macOS Updates in System Preferences. What Apple didn’t explain when it updated the Mac App Store is that macOS updates have been moved from the Mac App Store to System Preferences.

HomeKit Support for Siri. Among the iOS apps ported to macOS as part of the upcoming release of Mojave is Home. The app does not currently support AirPlay 2, but control of HomeKit devices is not limited to the Home app itself; Siri can also be used to control devices.

System-Wide Twitter and Facebook Support Removed. In High Sierra, users could log into Twitter and Facebook from the Internet Accounts section of System Preferences and share content using the share button in apps like Safari. Like iOS did in iOS 11, the Mojave beta has removed system-level support for sharing content via Twitter and Facebook.

The Final Version to Support 32-Bit Apps. During the State of the Union presentation, Apple confirmed that Mojave will be the last version of macOS to support 32-bit apps. When a user tries to open a 32-bit app, Mojave currently displays a one-time warning that the app will not work in future versions of macOS.

Favicon Support in Safari Tabs. Unlike Google’s Chrome browser, macOS doesn’t currently support favicons in Safari tabs. According to an article by John Gruber last summer, that led a significant number of people to use Chrome and third-party solutions like Faviconographer, which overlaid favicons on Safari’s tabs. When Mojave ships, Safari will add support for tab favicons, which are coming to iOS too.

Apple Mail Stationary Removed. According to the release notes for the macOS Mojave beta, Stationary, the HTML email feature that allowed users to choose from pre-built email templates, has been removed from the app.

​
You can also follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2018 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2018 RSS feed.

Craig Federighi Shares More Details on Porting iOS Apps to the Mac

Near the end of yesterday’s WWDC keynote, Craig Federighi shared that Apple was at work on tools that would enable developers to more efficiently bring their iOS apps to the Mac. The ship date for those tools isn’t until 2019, but this was still a major announcement, with plenty of questions left unanswered. Today Lauren Goode of Wired has published a new interview with Federighi in which a few additional details are shared on exactly how porting apps from iOS to Mac will work.

Read more

Apple Design Awards 2018 Winners Announced

This evening, capping off the first day of Apple’s WWDC conference, the company recognized the best of the App Store at its 2018 Apple Design Awards ceremony.

The Apple Design Awards are a WWDC tradition dating back all the way before the turn of the century. The ceremony is an opportunity for Apple to applaud developers whose apps demonstrate a high level of quality and innovation. 2017’s winners included the excellent Things 3 and Bear.

Last year the company broke from its norm for the ADAs by making them a private ceremony, exclusive to the award winners themselves, rather than a public event for all conference attendees. This year things were back to normal, as all developers in attendance could attend.

Apple selected the following apps across iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS as 2018 Apple Design Award winners:

Read more

WWDC 2018 Keynote: By the Numbers

Every time Apple holds a keynote event, the company shares a variety of numbers related to things like user counts for certain products, software performance improvements, and customer satisfaction. With the company announcing the future of key platforms like iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS today, there was unsurprisingly a lot of data mentioned at today’s WWDC event.

We’ve collected some of the most important numbers shared on-stage during the keynote and outlined them below.

Read more

watchOS 5: The MacStories Overview

This morning at the WWDC keynote presentation in San Jose, Apple’s Vice President of Technology Kevin Lynch took the stage to announce the latest version of the company’s smartwatch operating system. watchOS 5 will ship this fall and include improvements to the Apple Watch fitness features, new methods of communication, Siri and notification enhancements, the introduction of web content, and more.

Over the coming months we’ll be diving deep into these new features and testing them thoroughly, but for now read on for an in-depth overview and some initial thoughts on everything new in watchOS 5.

Read more

iOS 12: The MacStories Overview

Every year a major new version of iOS is released, adding a wealth of powerful improvements that transform the way we use some of our most important tools in life. In comparison to updates in recent years, iOS 12 – which Apple introduced at today’s WWDC keynote – doesn’t have as many flashy new features or major changes to system apps. When it gets in public hands this fall, lots of users may install it and not notice anything different. And that’s partly on purpose.

Apple spent a lot of time this year focusing on performance improvements that make iOS run better on a wide assortment of devices. In iOS 12, even though your iPhone or iPad may not be getting a major Home screen redesign or anything similarly noticeable, one change Apple hopes you will recognize is that your device runs better than ever before. In addition to being available on all the same hardware as iOS 11, iOS 12 claims to bring a Camera that opens up to 70 percent faster from the Lock screen, apps that launch up to twice as fast, smoother animations system-wide, a keyboard that loads up to 50 percent faster, and more response typing. These may not be the kind of details that make for great marketing campaigns, but they make the tasks we do every day better.

It’s not fair to call iOS 12 a release mainly focused on fixing bugs and improving performance, however. Apple has also put together an impressive assortment of features, big and small, which will empower you to do things with your device that wasn’t previously possible. There are impressive new automation capabilities integrated deeply with Siri, improved tools for monitoring how you use your devices, excellent new features for Messages, FaceTime, Photos, and more, and the arrival of ARKit 2.


Here’s an in-depth look at all that iOS 12 will bring when it launches this fall.

Read more

Apple Redesigns Mac App Store with iOS-like Editorial Focus, New Product Pages, and More

During the WWDC keynote today, Apple announced a redesigned Mac App Store, elements of which leaked this past Saturday in a 30-second Mac App Store preview video for Xcode 10.1 The video was discovered by Steve Troughton-Smith:

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1002893737037582336

Unlike the iOS App Store, the Mac App Store has never included preview videos, which indicated additional Mac App Store improvements were likely.

Those suspicions were confirmed during the keynote this morning when Apple revealed an ambitious redesign of the Mac App Store. The update takes several cues from the iOS App Store, implementing lessons learned from that store’s successful update in iOS 11.

Read more