Set backstage at three iconic product launches and ending in 1998 with the unveiling of the iMac, Steve Jobs takes us behind the scenes of the digital revolution to paint an intimate portrait of the brilliant man at its epicenter.
Judging by this trailer, Apple and its bloggers are not going to like this film. It doesn't exactly paint Jobs in a pretty light.
In late March a handful of the western world's best-known iPhone hackers were flown business class to Beijing. They were put up in the five-star Park Hyatt and given a tour of the sites; the Great Wall, the Forbidden City. "They kept referring to us as 'great gods'. I'm guessing it just translates to 'famous person', but we couldn’t contain our giggles every time the translators said it," says Joshua Hill, a 30-year-old from Atlanta who was one of the chosen few.
It was a bizarre trip hosted by an equally bizarre and secretive entity called TaiG (pronounced "tie-gee"), which flew the hackers to China to share techniques and tricks to slice through the defences of Apple's mobile operating system in front of an eager conference-hall crowd. Why such interest and why such aggrandisement of iOS researchers? In the last two years, jailbreaking an iPhone - the act of removing iOS' restrictions against installing unauthorized apps, app stores and other features by exploiting Apple security - has become serious business in China. From Alibaba to Baidu, China's biggest companies are supporting and even funding the practice, unfazed at the prospect of peeving Apple, which has sought to stamp out jailbreaking ever since it became a craze in the late 2000s.
I had no idea jailbreaking iOS was this popular in China.
At this point, we in the web community need to come to terms with the fact that Safari has become the new IE. Microsoft is repentant these days, Google is pushing the web as far as it can go, and Mozilla is still being Mozilla. Apple is really the one singer in that barbershop quartet hitting all the sour notes, and it's time we start talking about it openly instead of tiptoeing around it like we're going to hurt somebody's feelings. Apple is the most valuable company in the world; they can afford to take a few punches.
If you've been watching the news recently, you'll know of the huge debate in the U.S over the role of the Confederate flag in contemporary America. Many see it as a reminder of the many pre-Civil War injustices while others see it simply as a way to honor the soldiers who died for the Confederacy. Many large US companies, like Walmart and Amazon, have already banned the sale of any Confederate flag merchandise as a reaction to the recent events. Now, it appears that Apple has decided to join them by pulling many Civil War wargames from the App Store. As of the writing of this story, games like Ultimate General: Gettysburg and all the Hunted Cow Civil War games are nowhere to be found. Apple is famous for reaching for the axe rather than the scalpel when it comes to political issues (like rejecting Hunted Cow's Tank Battle 1942 for depicting Germans and Russians as enemies), so this move doesn't come as a great surprise.
While it's obvious that the Confederate flag has no place in, on, or around government buildings, it seems a bit insane to ban games (movies? Books? Comics?) that take place in the US Civil War era for showing the flag.
On a sidenote - three Apple stories in a row? What's happening?
For a long time, iOS apps have been able to open links as web views. When you tap a link in a Twitter client, an RSS reader, or a bookmark utility, it usually opens in a mini browser that doesn't leave the app, providing you with the convenience of not having to switch between Safari and the app. For years, in spite of some security concerns, this worked well and became the de-facto standard among third-party iOS apps.
With iOS 9, Apple wants this to change - and they're bringing the power of Safari to any app that wants to take advantage of it.
I took a little time out today to watch WWDC Session 511 to learn about how Safari Content Blocking will work in iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan. After an hour, I had a little concept app running. I wont really explain the technical details of how the extensions work or how to create them, that is better done by watching the WWDC Session video directly, but I will say its frightfully easy and the code I used for the blocker detailed below is at the bottom of this page.
I'm not complaining.
A new iOS 9 feature added in beta 1 was only discovered when users attempted to update to beta 2 earlier today. This new feature will allow the operating system to intelligently delete applications if you don't have enough free space to perform a software update. Once the update is complete, the apps will automatically be reinstalled and your data will remain intact.
Clever feature. I would say 'something for Android to adopt', but then I remembered I'm an idiot.
Apple's impulsive response to Swift stands in stark contrast to their treatment of indie app developers, who have been lobbying Apple for almost seven years, requesting Apple reform policies in the App Store to no effect. In particular, Cue's use of the word "indie" can only be described as a callous slap in the face given the circumstances that indie developers have been facing.
iOS application developers are expendable, and have zero reach. Taylor Swift is unique, and has a quarter metric frickton of reach.
Do the math.
After being publicly smacked down by music's biggest star, Apple is changing its tune. Late Sunday night, Apple VP Eddy Cue responded to the open letter that Taylor Swift posted earlier in the day, revealing that Apple now plans to pay artists, labels, and publishers for streams during Apple Music's three-month free trial. The premium streaming service is due to launch on June 30th.
Taylor Swift just outsmarted one of the biggest, richest, and most arrogant companies on earth. Impressive.
The fact that Apple announced this sudden tail-between-its-legs change of heart in the middle of the night (might've been late Sunday night for US - I suck at timezones), via Twitter no less, is indicative of how badly thought-out this whole Apple Music thing seems to be. The presentation during WWDC was awkward, the three month trial period heavily criticised, and now this. Curious.
This is not about me. Thankfully I am on my fifth album and can support myself, my band, crew, and entire management team by playing live shows. This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success. This is about the young songwriter who just got his or her first cut and thought that the royalties from that would get them out of debt. This is about the producer who works tirelessly to innovate and create, just like the innovators and creators at Apple are pioneering in their field... But will not get paid for a quarter of a year's worth of plays on his or her songs.
I'm sure the web will be flooded with slightly differently worded but effectively the same this-isn't-Apple's-fault blog posts and comments shortly, but this whole saga does seem like a major punch in the stomach for small and/or upstart artists. They've already got it rough in this business, and along comes the hugely powerful Apple, who, despite the incredible riches it has stashed away in tax havens, wrangles even that little bit of coin from them.
Stay classy, Apple.
We don't ask you for free iPhones. Please don't ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.
I don't know much about Taylor Swift other than that she's really popular in the US, but that is one wicked burn.
I bought an Apple Watch, and I've been wearing it for about two weeks. I'm a notorious mobile computing fanatic and early adopter. How does it hold up to real-world use? How does it compare to the hype?
Let's get this out of the way: I've been waiting for an Apple Watch for a long time. While a lot of people were quick to dismiss the whole idea, I've been on board with the idea of a wrist-mounted companion to a smartphone since I first started using a smartphone. I never bought a Pebble or any of the other first generation smart watches, largely because I've been around the block long enough to know that it's hard to be an early adopter, but partially because I wanted to wait and see what Apple would come up with.
I tend not to link to podcasts - I don't like podcasts and prefer good ol' text - but this one is pretty great.
Recorded in front of a live audience at Mezzanine in San Francisco, John Gruber is joined by Phil Schiller to discuss the news from WWDC: OS X 10.11 El Capitan, iOS 9, the new native app SDK for Apple Watch, Apple Music, and the 2004 American League Championship series.
It's a bit feelgood, of course, but it's still totally worth it. Schiller and Gruber hit it off on this one, and there's some great stories in there.
Most web users tolerate ads; many web users hate advertising with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. There are many good reasons that users dislike ads (they’re bad for performance, security, and privacy) as well as less universal, more arguable grievances (e.g. annoyance factor, disagreement about the value exchange for ad-funded services, etc).
Apple, a company that makes ~80%ish of their revenue from iOS-based products, recently announced that iOS 9 will ship with a compelling ad-filtering API for the Safari browser.
A brilliant move by Apple to force news providers (the rich ones, at least) to move to creating applications or join its Flipboard clone.
Apple's Flipboard clone uses Apple's own iAds, of course, which cannot be blocked at all.
An important bit of news from WWDC that deserves its own news item: you no longer need to be a licensed developer (i.e., paying) to test your applications on your own devices.
Xcode 7 and Swift now make it easier for everyone to build apps and run them directly on their Apple devices. Simply sign in with your Apple ID, and turn your idea into an app that you can touch on your iPad, iPhone, or Apple Watch. Download Xcode 7 beta and try it yourself today. Program membership is not required.
Of course, to distribute them, you still need to pay up.
Seconds later, deGrasse Tyson turned out to be the least of the problem. Apple also trots out McKinsey's James Manyika in the video, who starts off his quote with a phrase that should never be heard at tech conferences: "If you think the industrial revolution was transformational..."
I wasn't in San Francisco for WWDC, but I can only imagine the crowd at the keynote either fell silent or started howling uncontrollably as he finished that sentence: "...the App Store is way bigger."
It requires a special kind of chutzpah to compare any innovation to the industrial revolution. But to actually suggest that a collection of apps - a million or so fart soundboards, greedy casual games, and programs that help you get through you email a fraction faster - is anywhere close to the industrial revolution is beyond delusional.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who did a triple-take when this was said in Apple's App Store video last night. If this is truly how Apple feels about its contributions to the world - and everything points in the direction that it does - then the company has lost all sense of perspective and has transcended its usual playful arrogance towards full-on insanity.
Very disappointed in Neil deGrasse Tyson, too, for making similarly outrageous claims in this video.
With WWDC still underway, there's a lot more news than what made it in yesterday's article. First and foremost, Apple announced watchOS 2.0, which will bring native applications to the platform, as well as a feature called Time Travel that works much the same way as the timeline UI on the new Pebbles. It allows you to scroll into the future to see the upcoming appointments, the weather, and so on.
Apple is also merging its various developer programs. Instead of having to buy access to iOS and OS X separately, a single $99 fee will now net you access to iOS, OS X, and watchOS. Tangentially related: CarPlay now allows car makers to create applications that expand what CarPlay can do; e.g. control the climate control, radio, and other in-car features.
Apple also announced its new music streaming service, called Apple Music, which will be available for iOS, Windows, and Android. Speaking of Android - Apple has also made an Android application to help switchers move from Android to iOS.
OS X 10.11 will be named El Capitan, and among its major new features are the ability to snap windows side-by-side, and in case you're wondering how it works, just look at Windows 7 and later. It's a direct copy of the Aero Snap functionality, and I'm really glad Apple finally got around to copying this excellent Windows feature. I use it so often on Windows, I really, really miss it on any platform that doesn't have it.
Safari, too, fired up the photocopier, and this time around, Chrome's the obvious target. Safari in El Capitan is getting pinned sites, which is a useful Chrome feature that allows you to keep your favourite sites open all the time. Safari is also copying another great Chrome feature: the little indicator that tells you which tab is producing audio. As a Safari user on my retina MacBook Pro (Chrome is a battery hog on OS X), I am incredibly happy with these new features.
Apple is also bringing its Metal graphics API to from iOS to OS X, and Apple really focused on gaming when it comes to this one. I'm still not entirely sure who uses or even cares about gaming on OS X, but for those of you that do - this is surely great news. As has become the norm for OS X, El Capitan will be free, and will ship this fall. A public beta will be released in July.
Moving on, the major new features in OS 9 are also catch-up features, this time to Android, of course. The biggest one is Proactive, Apple's Google Now competitor. It offers similar functionality to Google Now, including reading your email to notify you of invitations and the like. Unlike Google, however, all the 'intelligent' stuff happens on the device itself - not on Apple's servers.
We'll have to see how well it works - if Proactive works just as well as Google Now, without requiring the kind of information Google claims it needs, Apple's got a winner on its hands. If it sucks, it will be a validation of Google's approach.
As a sidenote, I've never actualy really used Google Now. It does not work for me at all because my GMail account is a Google Apps account, which Google Now doesn't work with (yes, paying Google customers cannot use Google Now). It led to a fun situation when my friends and I were on vacation in the US, in October 2014. Google Now on their iPhones worked perfectly fine, bringing up boarding passes and relevant travel information, whereas my Nexus 5, a Google phone running Google software on a Google operating system, just showed me the weather back home. When I found out why, I turned off Google Now.
The keyboard has also been improved - and now does what every other smartphone platform has done for years: when you press shift, the keycaps will reflect the state. If you put two fingers on the keyboard, you can user them to move the selection cursor - a great feature that appears to be iPad-only for now. Apple is also introducing a new news application to iOS, which is basically a Flipboard copy.
The big new iOS feature is iPad-only: multitasking. If you've ever used Windows 8 on a tablet, you know how this works. Swiping in from the side, splitscreen view - we've all been here before. It literally works and looks exactly like Windows 8. Again - this is great. A lot was wrong with Windows 8's Metro UI for tablets, but its tablet multitasking is absolutely great and fantastic. I'm really glad Apple copied it, and it's high-time Android will do the same (in fact, there's early support for it in Android M).
So, much like Google's I/O keynote and Android M specifically, OS X El Capitan and iOS 9 are all about catching up to a number of stand-out features from the competition, so I can repeat here what I said then: another example of how competition between the major platforms makes both of them better - consumers, win.
Unlike Android, though, there's no update elephant in the room here. In fact, Apple has heard the complaints about the iOS 8 update being too big for iPhones with little storage, so iOS 9 is only 1.4GB in size. A great move, and it will ensure that every eligible device will be getting iOS 9. In addition, Apple isn't dropping any device with iOS 9 - if it runs iOS 8, it'll run iOS 9.
All in all, a great keynote with lots of awesome new features, but nothing we haven't seen before. Every single day, iOS and Android become ever more interchangeable. As consumers, the more these companies copy each other's great ideas, the more awesome features our platforms of choice will get.
I'll leave you with two final notes. First, Swift will be released as open source. Second, Apple had women up on stage to present new features for the very first time. It was about time.
Apple's Jony Ive has served as the company's Senior Vice President of Design for several years now, but Apple has announced today that the executive is being named Chief Design Officer (a newly-created position). Additionally, Ive and will be handing the managerial reins of both the industrial and software design units at Apple over to two new leaders on July 1st.
Ive's new role will still leave him in charge of the company's hardware and software design teams overall, but allowing others to handle the day-to-day affairs of each design group will free him up for other tasks. Among those other tasks, Ive says, is a focus on the design of Apple's retail stores and new campus.
Let the pointless speculation, begin.
Setting aside the absurdity of longtime Apple users arguing in favour of this kind of almost impenetrable complexity, John Gruber's recent piece on the behaviour of the button inside the Apple Watch's crown is telling.
Here's a better way to think about it - and without thinking about it, the reason why I think most people aren't frustrated or confused by the crown button after a week or so. It's best to think of Apple Watch as having two modes: watch mode, and app mode.
You do not need to understand this to use the watch. Most Apple Watch owners will never really think about this. But this idea of two modes is central to understanding the design of the overall interaction model.
The UI complexity problem of the Apple Watch stems from two sets of overlapping user interface elements: applications/glances and the homescreen/watch face (which are both, in turn, overlapped by the communications application and its dedicated button). For reasons that I do not understand (okay I totally understand why), the designers of the Apple Watch UI couldn't say no and couldn't make any decisions, leading to the clusterfrick of a UI it has now.
What puzzles me the most is that untangling this mess would not have been complicated - just copy the iPhone. Homescreen with application icons, and a (centered!) crown to act as a home button. Bam, done. Everything else is needless complexity, especially on such a small device you're not supposed to stare at for longer than a few seconds at a time anyway.
Gruber's piece is telling, because as a longtime Apple user, you should never need that many words to explain something that could be as elementary as the homescreen/home button combination of the iPhone. Needing this many words should raise all kinds of red flags that it's just not intuitive.
There're several reasons why it's easier to pick up an iPhone than an Android device, and the simplicity of its homescreen/home button is a big one.
Watch OS 1.0.1 includes performance improvements and bug fixes for Siri, measuring stand activity, calculating calories for indoor cycling and rowing workouts, distance and pace during outdoor walk and run workouts, accessibility, and third-party apps. The software update also includes support for new emojis found in iOS 8.3 and provides additional language support for Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Thai, and Turkish.
Download it through the Apple Watch application on your phone.
Meanwhile, the big Android Wear 5.1.1 update is available by buying the new LG Watch Urbane, or for LG ZenWatch owners. Oh Google.