General

Home automation, a category more broadly referred to as the “internet of things,” is almost surely going to be a large and growing market in the coming years. And while Apple’s recently announced entry is the forthcoming HomeKit platform, Google has yet to announce anything exactly equivalent. At I/O 2014, however, Google did announce its plan for Nest, and shed much more light on its Android Wear smartwatch operating system.

Expand
Expanding
Close

As rumored last week, Apple has today released a new model of iMac. These machines are considerably cheaper than their predecessors, priced at $1099. Previously, the cheapest iMac SKU was priced at $1299 (which is now the mid-range model).

The cheaper iMac features a 1.4 GHz dual-core i5 CPU, which represents a significant worsening in performance over the previous base model of iMac, which featured a processor clocked at 2.7 GHz.  The CPU does Turbo Boost up to 2.7 GHz however, which does make up some of the difference.

Aside from the CPU, the hard drive has also been cut to 500 GB. The new model also features a lower-end integrated graphics chip. All other iMac models continue to use either Iris Pro integrated graphics or dedicated Nvidia cards. Otherwise, the internals of the new machine are unchanged.

Apple’s Press release below…

Expand
Expanding
Close

Bloomberg reports that Apple is moving more of its TV advertising in-house. This means the company is loosening ties with Chiat\Day, the ad agency Apple has used for more than 30 years, best known for producing Apple’s 1984 campaign.

Apple told Bloomberg that Apple’s ‘Pencil’ iPad ad, pictured above, was developed by Apple’s internal advertising team and are now responsible for all other TV ads airing now.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple is building on what it has learnt with the iOS autocorrect system to offer predictive word suggestions directly in the keyboard. QuickType supports many languages, including English, Chinese, British English and Spanish.

QuickType is contextually relevant, per contact. Some contacts get informal word suggestions, whereas serious conversations get more serious suggestions.

Apple used an example of a question; ‘Shall we get a movie or dinner?’. QuickType realised the context and offered suggestions for ‘dinner’ and ‘movie’ directly in the keyboard.

The code shows that this is a new addition for OS X 10.10 and iOS 8.

Slightly ahead of the keynote later today, Apple has pushed some of its new APIs for developers into the open-source channels. The class in question is a new view that appears to replace the current iOS and OS X WebKit implementations, which enables apps to show webpages and other content inline.

The new framework seems to indicate a focus on cross-platform API compatibility, between iOS and OS X. The leaked framework seems to be fully feature-compatible across platforms. This differs to the situation today, where developers must use the ‘WebView’ class for OS X and ‘UIWebView’ for iOS. This should help developers write more reusable code.

Expand
Expanding
Close

In a statement to Re/code, Apple has acknowledged the iMessage issue which affects customers who switch away from the iPhone, without disabling iMessage. This means that texts to these users are never delivered, as iPhone devices continue to use the iMessage protocol on the phone number that is no longer associated with an iPhone. Aside from a second-hand report by an AppleCare representative, this is Apple’s first official response to the recent criticism.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Update: The glitch may be related with the latest versions of Find My Mac and iTunes, according to testing by The Mac Observer.

Since upgrading to OS X 10.9.3, some users are reporting that their /Users folder is now hidden. This means the folder is no longer visible when looking at the root of the hard drive in the Finder, which is inconvenient for Macs with multiple users installed.

With OS X Lion, Apple took the liberty to hide the Library folder from OS X users. However, it does not seem like hiding the /Users directory is an Apple design decision. Many users are still seeing this folder after updating and the behaviour is consistent. The most likely conclusion is that is simply a bug that slipped through to final release, despite Apple’s new beta testing program. If you are affected by this bug, you can find out how to make your /Users folder visible again after the break …

Expand
Expanding
Close

Re/code have just announced that their upcoming Code Conference will feature interviews with Apple’s SVP’s Craig Federighi, head of software engineering, and Eddy Cue, lead of Internet Software and Services. This will take place on the second day of the event, May 28th.

9to5Mac will be live there to cover the event. Re/code will also be posting videos of the interviews throughout the conference. The equivalent conference (the D conference) has historically had a strong Apple presence. The show hosted interviews with Steve Jobs sporadically over his career and played host to Tim Cook for the last two years.

Expand
Expanding
Close