Stephen and Federico walk through their new Mac mini setups, then Federico fights with iCloud in Radar #46282145. Please help.
On this week’s episode of Connected, Stephen and I discuss our new Mac minis and I explain how I’ve started using it for automation. You can listen here.
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YouTube’s take on the popular Stories format from Instagram and Snapchat was previously only available to select YouTubers, but starting today it’s rolling out to all accounts with over 10,000 subscribers. Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:
YouTube is beginning to roll out Stories to a wider set of creators, giving them access to the new creation tools that include the ability to decorate the videos with text, stickers, filters, and more.
The feature is very much inspired by rival social apps like Snapchat and Instagram – except that, in YouTube’s case, Stories disappear after 7 days, not 24 hours.
The idea behind YouTube Stories is to give creators any easy way to engage with their fans in between their more polished and produced videos. Today’s creators are no longer simply turning a camera on and vlogging – they’re creating professional content that requires editing and a lot of work before publication, for the most part.
While I haven’t encountered any of my favorite YouTubers using Stories yet, I hope that changes after today. While Instagram’s IGTV seems like it hasn’t taken off very well, plenty of YouTubers remain heavy users of Instagram Stories. If YouTube Stories can offer a similar experience, without users needing to leave YouTube, it could be a really solid addition to the platform.
In an interview with CNET, Apple Vice President Greg Joswiak revealed that the iPhone XR has been the best selling of the latest iPhone models every day since it was launched, a statement that is no doubt aimed at recent reports that XR parts orders have been reduced due to weak demand. Joswiak declined to provide specific sales figures to CNET.
The company will donate $1 for every Apple Pay purchase at an Apple Store, Apple.com or through the Apple Store app from Dec. 1 to Dec. 7, and it plans to turn 125 Apple Store logos red in honor of the day.
That’s similar to last year, except that this year the donation does not include in-app transactions, and Joswiak told CNET the App Store is not participating with any special promotions this year. That’s a shame because past Red-themed promotions raised awareness of Red’s efforts to combat AIDS as well as funds to support the group’s work.
If you’re at all like me, then now is the time of year you receive the most packages. In the midst of the holiday season, the usual assortment of deliveries my wife and I have coming for ourselves are joined by all the gifts we’ve purchased for others. It couldn’t be better timing, then, that my package tracker of choice, Deliveries, has added Siri shortcut support today.
We have some news to share. Tiny has purchased a majority stake in Castro. We are still shareholders and will continue working on the app full time.
The post goes on to explain the reasons for this transfer of ownership.
Castro has reached a size where the demands of running the business have been pulling us in too many different directions. We haven’t been able to focus as much on the core work of designing and building a product. Selling to Tiny gets Castro access to more resources, contacts and expertise. By growing the team we can specialize our roles to be more focused individually and get more done collectively. We can get back to what we’re good at and what we love doing.
Castro underwent a business model transition earlier this year, moving from paid up front with Castro 2 to free with Castro 3 alongside the launch of the Castro Plus subscription option. It sounds like that shift has led to an increased amount of administrative work for Supertop’s development team, which should be alleviated thanks to this acquisition. The post concludes:
We’ve started work on Castro 4. The plan is to improve the design to bring more listeners into the Castro flow. We’re excited, because for the first time in five years of work on Castro, we’ll have the resources to focus exclusively on it as product designers and developers, without contract work to distract us, and with a team around us to handle the administrative tasks.
Castro is one of the best podcast clients on iOS, so I’m thankful that today’s announcement doesn’t spell its end. On the contrary, it sounds like there’s reason to be hopeful about the app’s future in Tiny’s hands. Only time will tell, of course, so I’ll be curious to watch the app’s update cycle over the coming year.
We’ve all been there. You’re signing up for a new service or creating an account for a new app, and you’re asked to pick a password. You know you should use a strong, random password, but in a rush to get started, you take the easy path and choose a weak, memorable password instead because it’s the path of least resistance.
Apple has been pushing back against those bad habits with new iOS features designed to combat password reuse by flipping the calculus on its head. In an excellent presentation given at PasswordsCon 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden last week, Apple engineer Ricky Mondello explains the iCloud Keychain features implemented in iOS since iOS 11 and the thinking behind them. He also provides tips and resources for web and app developers who want to integrate better with those features.
What I especially like about Mondello’s talk is the insight into the thought and effort that’s gone into making good passwords easy to create. It’s not something I’ve thought about much before, which I take as a sign that Apple’s Safari and iCloud Keychain engineers are succeeding.
The presentation is also fascinating from a design and user experience standpoint. As Mondello explains, people are ill-suited to create and remember random passwords. It’s a problem that’s right in a computer’s wheelhouse, but one that also requires users’ trust and an understanding of their habits to solve.
I recommend watching Mondello’s talk. There are a lot of interesting implementation details throughout the talk and insights into the thinking behind them, which are approachable whether you have a background in the topics covered or not.
Over the past few days, I’ve seen a ton of people on Twitter (including plenty of folks I’d describe as pretty tech savvy) have their mind blown by a tweet explaining how to move the cursor on the iOS keyboard.
[…]
This points to a larger, more fundamental issue cropping up with iOS as the platform becomes more mature: how do you add functionality and make it easily discoverable?
Some of the challenge here is simply because of iOS’s constraints: Where on the smaller screen can you add more features that would be easy to discover? But another challenge is how the OS is architected. The Mac nearly always treated the menu bar as a “safe” zone to which you could always retreat if you needed to find a command. There’s no real analogue to that on iOS, with the exception perhaps of the status bar, which isn’t, aside from the aforementioned “jump to the top” feature, an interactive element.
I think this is a big part of the challenge Apple is dealing with as it continues to evolve and push iOS forward. iOS has made easy so many things that used to be difficult or require a lot of technical know-how, but as we ask more from our devices and as developers deliver it, we lose some of that initial pared-down elegance that Apple sought.
So you could buy an LG UltraFine 5K Display, but you might not want to. That’s because the availability of that monitor seems to be in decline, with AppleInsider reporting that Apple Stores say it hasn’t been restocked in a while and that it’s not available for in-store pickup when ordered online. With luck, its availability is dropping because LG is replacing it with a new model, but LG could just be running down stock before discontinuing it.
The Wikipedia page for 5K resolution lists a small number of other 5K displays, including screens from Dell, Philips, and HP, but as far as I can tell, none are currently for sale, apart from a handful of ultra-wide monitors with unusual aspect ratios like 64:27 and 32:9. Also on that list is the Iiyama ProLite XB2779QQS, but its page on Amazon says it ships directly from Japan and has absolutely no ratings or reviews, which is suspicious.
Good overview of the current state of 5K displays for Macs, which seemingly haven’t taken off because the industry has settled on 4K for now and 8K for the next generation.
Toward the end of his post, Engst assumes that the Apple-branded display coming next year with the Mac Pro will likely rely on Thunderbolt 3. My hope, however, is that Apple can figure out a way to offer a 4K or 5K display that works via Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C with support for ProMotion refresh rates at 120Hz. The 2018 iPad Pros can only connect to USB-C displays (not Thunderbolt 3), which is why I ended up buying a 4K UltraFine display that works with both macOS and iOS via a single USB-C cable. I want to believe that Apple’s external display comeback will support both pro Macs and pro iPads; as the owner of a new Mac mini and iPad Pro used with the same LG display, an integrated Apple solution would be the dream setup.
