iCloud

Two weeks ago Upthere, the cloud company co-founded by former OS X chief Bertrand Serlet, officially launched after several years of stealth development. Details were still sparse on what exactly Upthere would offer aside from being a different kind of cloud service option for your data. Now Upthere is officially launching its first products in beta: Upthere Home and Upthere Camera.

The idea behind Upthere is that data connections are plenty fast for a lot of people but local storage is a growing issue. Cloud services like Dropbox and iCloud tackle different areas of the problem is different ways, but Upthere believes keeping everything on the server then bringing it to your device on demand is the suitable approach. I got the chance to try out each of the new apps overnight, and while my data is spread across iCloud and Dropbox right now, Upthere’s new apps make a good first impression and look promising.
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Former OS X chief Bertrand Serlet is finally ready to talk about his cloud startup UpThere after founding the company in 2011. While Sertlet isn’t completely taking the wraps off the company he assembled after leaving Apple four years ago, UpThere is opening a beta for its cloud service today following nearly three years of silence. The service is said to be similar to iCloud, Dropbox, and similar cloud solutions, but UpThere’s strategy is fast access to data stored online and not syncing content across devices. The beta will preview two products coming down from UpThere…
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Image via Jon Brodkin

Tomorrow will mark three months since the launch of iOS 8.4 and Apple Music, and this means that the first free trial sign-ups will begin expiring. In its latest push to retain users, Apple has begun emailing users with set-to-expire trials as well as pushing notifications to their devices. As can be seen in the image above, the notification encourages users to renew.

As we learned in the summer, users who do not manually end their free trial with Apple Music will be automatically opted into continuing their subscription for either $9.99 or $14.99 (family plan). Users who wish to not continue with Apple Music can disable their subscriptions manually via their iTunes account page. Last week, our own Ben Lovejoy weighed the pros and cons of Apple Music in order to make his own renewal decision.

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Following an announcement last week from Apple that it was delaying support for iOS 9’s App Thinning feature due to a bug with iCloud backups, Apple today released Xcode version 7.0.1 to developers to fix related bugs.
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Apple has announced that one of iOS 9’s big new features, App Thinning (or “app slicing”), has been delayed due to an issue with iOS 9. App Thinning was announced at WWDC as a way to help trim down the size of large applications by letting developers mark assets for each specific type of device. When users download the app, the App Store will determine which device they have and only require them to download the assets necessary to run on their device.

While TestFlight has supported the feature for a few weeks, Apple says the public version of iOS 9 will not support it until a later update due to a problem with the way iCloud handles backups.

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Pixelmator today released the latest version of its photo editor for iPhone and iPad, Pixelmator version 2.1. The update brings full support for iPad iOS 9 multitasking, the ability to import and edit 8K resolution images, Open-In-Place document management across iOS and more.

As part of general improvements for iOS 9, such as adoption of Apple’s new system font (San Francisco) in the UI, the primary change is the addition of the iPad multitasking support. This means Pixelmator can now be docked to the side of the screen using Slide Over. On more recent iPads, you can also pop Pixelmator into Split View for true 2-app side-by-side multitasking.

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Apple has admitted that it is App Store integrity was compromised as apps were secretly infected by fake Xcode tools before submission to the App Store. The company has now officially acknowledged the problem and is now removing apps affected by this ‘hack’ from the App Store.

Developers were inadvertently submitting malware by using counterfeit versions of Xcode, Apple’s development software, to submit apps. The fake Xcode, dubbed XcodeGhost, would inject malicious code into otherwise-legitimate apps during the submission process.

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Apple has started a new big project in its web services division, according to The Information. The report claims Apple has decided to rewrite its cloud services to all fall under one single technology stack using open-source technologies. This will combine Apple’s services like iCloud, Siri, iTunes and more into a unified backend platform.

Apple has seemingly settled on Mesos, the backend infrastructure for Siri, as the core of its new platform which will take years to finish. Apple publicly revealed it had moved Siri to a Mesos stack earlier in the year.

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Transferring files from your old iPhone to a new iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus isn’t difficult, but after a reader emailed about the many, many hours he expected to wait for the old-to-new iPhone transfer process to complete, I realized that his experience has become more common — even though it’s not necessary. Years ago, iTunes was the only (and fairly straightforward) way to transfer one iPhone’s contents to another. But now, between iCloud, larger device capacity sizes, and iTunes encryption options, there are certainly ways to turn a simple process into a day-long ordeal.

This quick How-To guide is designed to save you a wasted day by helping you select the best options in iTunes and get most of the work done ahead of time. I’ve used this process more times than I can count, and beyond working perfectly each time, it requires far fewer hours than relying on iCloud…

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Apple shared today that the upcoming iOS 9 software update for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch will be released to everyone in one week on September 16th. Alongside the official iOS 9 release date, Apple also introduced new price tiers for iCloud storage upgrades.

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Apple has quietly added a new data restore feature to iCloud.com, enabling users to rollback accidentally deleted documents, calendar changes and contacts. The new ‘Restore Files’, ‘Restore Contacts’ and ‘Restore Calendars’ features are hidden in iCloud.com Advanced Settings pane.

Seemingly unrelated to iCloud backup, Apple shows snapshots of your recently deleted documents and lets you put them back onto iCloud Drive. This means there is now a way to recover accidentally deleted iCloud documents for the first time, because there is no equivalent to the Trash folder in iCloud.

Similarly, Contacts restoration shows timestamped snapshots of  your iCloud contacts database. Restoring to an earlier version reverts all changes made since the backup date. Unlike with files, you cannot individually restore single contacts. The same is true for Calendars.

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Apple is reportedly conducting internal testing on a service that allows Siri to transcribe your voicemail messages into text, so that you can read them rather than having to listen to them. Business Insider reports that the service is expected to be launched next year.

When someone using iCloud Voicemail is unable to take a call, Siri will answer instead of letting the call go to a standard digital audio recorder. 

iCloud Voicemail can relay information about where you are and why you can’t pick up the phone to certain people. But the coolest feature of the service is that Siri will transcribe any incoming voicemails, just like it does with anything else you say to it.

The piece says that a number of Apple employees are currently trialling the service to determine its reliability … 
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Image: n3rdabl3.co.uk

Popular iOS and Android apps from companies like Walmart, ESPN, Slack and SoundCloud have been found vulnerable to password cracking, according to a recent report from AppBugs. The security firm found that dozens of the most popular apps are lacking, in that they allow you to make any number of attempts to login without restriction. These clearly opens up a gap for attackers who have the means to guess those passwords and gain access to your accounts.

The most secure apps will force you to reset your password if you don’t enter it correctly, or they’ll lock you out after you’ve made a certain number of attempts.

AppBugs tested the most popular apps to see how they stacked up. It checked 100 popular apps which support password-protected web accounts and limited themselves to apps which had been downloaded at least 1 million times. Of those 100 apps, 53 were found to have the vulnerability.

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Earlier this month, Greece instituted new regulations amid the country’s financial crisis that blocked users from renewing iCloud subscriptions and buying from iTunes and the App Store. At the time, this left many users wondering what would happen to their iCloud data, seeing that they legally couldn’t pay to keep their subscription alive. Now, however, it appears that Apple is stepping up to ensure that user data remains intact during Greece’s financial crisis.

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