Apple released iOS 10.2 to the public today, bringing new and redesigned emoji, a variety of improvements to system apps and settings, and, for US-based users, the debut of the previously announced TV app.
Apple Releases iOS 10.2 with new Emoji, TV App, and More
Calendar Spam Reporting Added to iCloud.com→
Last month a rash of spam calendar invitations began showing up in iCloud users’ calendars from unknown senders. Benjamin Mayo at 9to5Mac reports that Apple has begun rolling out a ‘Report Junk’ link on iCloud.com to address the situation:
This lets users remove spammy invites from their calendar and reports the sender to Apple for further investigation.
At the moment the fix is available through iCloud.com only. Presumably the feature will be added to a future update to iOS, though it has not made an appearance in the iOS 10.2 betas to date.
If you receive a spam calendar invitation, log into iCloud.com, navigate to the spam invitation, open it, and look for the ‘Report Junk’ link. Clicking that link and confirming that the invitation is junk will remove the event from your calendar and report the sender to Apple. Calendar spam can be reported as junk whether or not you have accepted the invitation first, although it is best to avoid accepting spam invitations because it alerts the senders that the invitation was sent to an active iCloud account.
Game Day: Le Parker – Sous Chef Extraordinaire
There are a lot of pixel art platformers on the App Store. The hard part if finding the good ones. Too many are shallow imitations of classics like Super Mario Bros. that lack their own personality and challenges. Le Parker – Sous Chef Extraordinaire by Play Pretend is different. There are superficial similarities to the classics, like the save-the-princess storyline, but Le Parker brings together bright, colorful pixel art, fun sound effects, a great soundtrack, and challenging gameplay in a way that puts it head and shoulders above other App Store platformers.
The storyline is simple. You are Le Parker, a chef and the creator of a meringue so light it floats on air. Only the princess has the recipe until one day, the king and his men capture her and banish you from the kingdom. Your goal is to save the princess and recover your magical meringue.
The controls of Le Parker are simple. You run forward and back by dragging a finger left and right across a button in the lower, left-hand corner of the screen. In the opposite corner is an ‘A’ button for jumping. Single tap for one jump and double tap to double jump. How high you jump depends on how long you press the ‘A’ button.
Along your journey, there are macaroons to collect instead of coins. Every 100 macaroons you collect gives you an extra life, which you’ll need. There are also special items scattered throughout the level, including chef hats that give you an extra life and hidden kitchen utensils. Enemies roam Le Parker’s world inflicting damage that can be healed by finding hearts.
I’ve played many iOS games that look better than they play. What’s special about Le Parker is that there’s substance behind the polished artwork. Each of the 32 levels is deep and designed to keep you coming back to find hidden collectibles or beat the clock with Time Attack challenges. That said, this game is also great to look at. It’s colorful, detailed, and creates a real sense of continuity and presence in Le Parker’s world. Add to that a soundtrack with over twenty songs and the result is a delightful and engaging experience.
Le Parker is a universal app that works equally well on iPhones and iPads, though the iPad’s larger screen helps bring the game to life. Unlike many games, Le Parker syncs your progress among multiple devices. Le Parker also supports the Apple TV. I have found precious few games that are worth playing on the Apple TV, but Le Parker stands out from the crowd. The levels look great on a big screen, but the clincher is that if you have a third-party controller, the controls work better than most games. Mashing a physical ‘A’ button and controlling Le Parker with a thumbstick makes the game feel more like a classic platformer than touchscreen buttons ever could.
If you’re a fan of platform games and especially if you want a challenging game that looks and sounds great, give Le Parker a try this weekend.
Le Parker – Sous Chef Extraordinaire is available on the App Store for $2.99.
Super Mario Run Requires a Constant Internet Connection→
Adam Rosenberg, writing for Mashable, interviewed Shigeru Miyamoto on the upcoming release of Super Mario Run. According to Miyamoto, Nintendo had to implement an always-on requirement for an Internet connection due to “security” concerns, which he clarified thusly:
Just to be clear: When you say “security,” you mean the risk of piracy, right?
That’s correct.
Unlike our dedicated game devices, the game is not releasing in a limited number of countries. We’re launching in 150 countries and each of those countries has different network environments and things like that. So it was important for us to be able to have it secure for all users.
Miyamoto also argues that two of the game’s three modes rely on an Internet connection, and it was easier to go all-in with the requirement. Nintendo may have their reasons, but I don’t think this will go down well with customers who will pay to play a game that was advertised as ideal for one-handed gameplay on subways, where Internet connections are spotty.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Nintendo reverses the decision, at least for the main mode. If they don’t, it’s still a disappointment.
Television Time Review: A Modern Guide to TV
Many years ago, weekends at my grandparents’ went like this: flip on the TV, peruse through all the channels hoping to find something I like, and eventually hand over the remote to my grandfather, when he would then search the paper TV guide for that night’s programming.
The days of using those guides are long gone, but the need to see what shows are coming up is still relevant. For that, I’ve been using Television Time, a beautiful TV guide for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
Canvas, Episode 25: Workflow - Web APIs→
This week Fraser and Federico dive into Web service API programming in Workflow.
In the latest episode of the Workflow series, Fraser and I turn our attention to the web and what you can do with web services and APIs in Workflow. You can listen here.
If you haven’t listened to the previous episodes of the Workflow series yet, you’ll want to go back and start from there.
- Workflow - The Basics
- Workflow - Variables and Built-in Actions
- Workflow - Third Party Applications
- Workflow - Web APIs
Sponsored by:
Workflow Adds Bear Automation→
In the latest update released today, Workflow has received support for six new Bear actions. Bear is the note-taking app with power-user features I reviewed in November, which I’m still using.
With the new Workflow actions, you can further automate Bear without writing a single URL scheme yourself. They are quite powerful: you can create new notes in the app, open a specific note in Bear (something Apple Notes can’t do), and even turn a webpage into Markdown and save it as a note in Bear.
My favorite action, though, is ‘Add to Bear Note’, which can take any file or text and append it to an existing note. I have a Scratchpad note in Bear where I keep a little bit of everything, and with this workflow I can quickly pick a file or a photo and send it to the bottom of the note. Great stuff.
Bear actions are available in the latest version of Workflow.
Apple Maps Adds ChargePoint Integration→
Jordan Kahn of Electrek reports on the latest improvement to Apple Maps:
Apple has been slowly adding more electric charging station listings to Apple Maps since the release of iOS 10, and today the world’s largest EV charging network, ChargePoint, officially confirmed integration.
The official integration not only means that ChargePoint’s network of charging stations will now be visible as EV Charger badges within Apple Maps, allowing users to tap through to get more info on the station, but users can also initiate charging and complete payment from a link in Apple Maps to the ChargePoint app (Apple Pay included).
Ever since Apple first set out to create its own mapping solution, and found it more difficult than expected, it has aggressively pursued various partnerships to expand the breadth and veracity of its mapping data. Those partnerships have seemed to slow down of late, likely because Maps has less improving to do today than it did shortly following its 2012 launch.
Having spent several years building partnerships to ensure its data won’t lead any drivers astray, Apple has more recently been able to focus on integrating data that’s less important, but still quite useful. A few months ago we saw the company team up with Parkopedia to improve parking data, and now charging stations are a natural next step.
Apple and the State of Its AI Research→
Dave Gershgorn, writing for Quartz, published the details of an invitation-only lunch at the NIPS 2016 conference, where Apple’s newly appointed director of AI research, Russ Salakhutdinov, elaborated on the state of AI and machine learning at Apple.
There are lots of interesting tidbits on what Apple is doing, but this part about image processing and GPUs caught my attention:
A bragging point for Apple was the efficiency of its algorithms on graphics processing units, or GPUs, the hardware commonly used in servers to speed processing in deep learning. One slide claimed that Apple’s image recognition algorithm could process twice as many photos per second as Google’s (pdf), or 3,000 images per second versus Google’s 1,500 per second, using roughly one third of the GPUs. The comparison was made against algorithms running on Amazon Web Services, a standard in cloud computing.
While other companies are beginning to rely on specialty chips to speed their AI efforts, like Google’s Tensor Processing Unit and Microsoft’s FPGAs, it’s interesting to note that Apple is relying on standard GPUs. It’s not known, however, whether the company builds its own, custom GPUs to match its custom consumer hardware, or buys from a larger manufacturer like Nvidia, which sells to so many internet companies it has been described as “selling shovels to the machine learning gold rush.”
In my review of iOS 10, I wondered4 how Apple was training its image recognition feature in the Photos app, citing the popular ImageNet database as a possible candidate. We have an answer to that today:
The images Apple uses to train its neural network on how to recognize images also seems to be proprietary, and is nearly twice the size of the standard ImageNet database.
According to Salakhutdinov, Apple will also be more open about their research and they will actively participate in the academic community.