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Happy new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus day, everyone! Whether you’re waiting patiently at home for TNT to rock up with your new shiny, or marvelling at the brilliance/stupidity of using a telepresence robot to reserve your spot in the line, the Friday morning news has the same great news, day in, day out. But enough about that — on with the news!
Apple’s official Q&A on the XcodeGhost situation has some honest guidance about what happened. Chinese developers downloaded illegitimate versions of Xcode, which were then used to develop and create apps which were also compromised. Apple has since removed copies of apps that were infected, is blocking further submissions of infected apps, and is working with software developers to get their apps back into the App Store as soon as possible.
To be honest, I’m not sure what to make of the story about a telepresence robot being used to line up at the Apple Store in Sydney. Mashable originally broke the story, but like I said, I got nothing. Crazy? Brilliant? You be the judge.
This ad-blocking thing is working out pretty well, because now the top ad-blocker on iOS, Crystal, is now taking payments from advertisers to show ads. The developer says the payments will likely be less than the revenue earned from sales of Crystal on the App Store, and you’ll also be able to disable the feature which allows “acceptable ads” to be displayed, but it all sounds kind of shady.
Apple has said that app slicing is currently available due to a bug in iCloud, and Ars Technica explains that it means the Universal version of apps will be downloaded to your device rather than one that contain the specific assets required for your device model and size. It’s possible this was why Apple re-released a whole bunch of app updates yesterday, forcing re-downloads of updates from as far back as last month. Apple has said they will be re-enabling app slicing once they resolve the bug.
Apple has released the second iOS 9.1 public beta a day after the same build was released to developers. While the update is mostly designed for the iPad Pro, there’s also a bunch of new emoji to get excited about — including an “eye in speech bubble” that doesn’t appear to be an official Unicode addition. Spooky.
OS X Server 5.0 is now out, bringing support for OS X El Capitan when that releases in a few days. IMore advises that users of the version for OS X Yosemite can upgrade for free — although if you’ve never purchased OS X Server, it’ll still set your back $24.99 on the Australian Mac App Store.
Google’s latest iOS app is Keep, which is yet another note-taking app that sits between Evernote and Simplenote, in terms of complexity. If you’re not already smitten with the new Notes in iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan (or want something decidedly more cross-platform) for your note-taing, Keep might be worth checking out.
Macworld’s list of iOS apps making the most out of watchOS 2 is presented as a slideshow, but that aside has some lesser-known apps that have third-party complications and some cool native app functionality.
Forget updates to Fantastical for Mac, because Flexibits has come out and said that they’re working on Fantastical for iOS updates that include complications for the Apple Watch. If everything goes as planned, the update should be out within the fortnight. Along a similar vein, Things also has big things planned for their iOS version, including multitasking support and quick actions from the home screen, for those of you with a new iPhone 6s or 6s Plus.
Over at Finer Things in Tech, David Chartier runs through his favourite features of iOS 9 in no particular order.
Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2015/09/friday-morning-news250915/