Friday Morning News

The Room Three iconA recent hire at Apple said to be working on a “secret project” (which may turn out to be not-so-secret after all) may pave the way for digital license plates for cars. Besides having the potential to cut down on administrative work associated with car registration, digital license plates may open up all kinds of possibilities, including vehicle-sharing, fleet management, and more.

Apple has opened up a Vietnamese-based subsidiary for the direct import and distribution of iPhones in the region. Reuters notes Vietnam is Apple’s highest growth region, with sales tripling after the last financial period, so it’s no doubt that this is an important move for Apple.

DigiTimes is saying Apple will continue to place orders with Synaptics for touchscreen components, due to a delay in ditching the iPhone home button. It’s something that Apple pundits have been looking forward to for years now, but it appears as if the removal of the home button won’t happen in the next iPhone model.

The first beta of tvOS 9.1 has revealed support for folders on the new Apple TV. Folders on tvOS work much the same way as their iOS counterparts, capable of holding a number of apps and sitting on the home screen alongside apps themselves. With the number of tvOS apps growing daily, folders or some other way of organising apps was only a matter of time.

Another day, another Apple beta. This time around, Apple has seeded the second beta of OS X 10.11.2 to members of its public beta testing program.

It isn’t the first app to be updated for 3D Touch features and Spotlight search, but Flickr’s iOS 9 app update is appreciated all the same.

Jason Kottke reminds us that focus means saying no, showing off a video of Steve Jobs responding to a question about killing off OpenDoc, an up-and-coming technology. A second video shows Jobs talking about Apple’s overall vision of the customer experience, which sometimes means making the hard decisions.

Something I didn’t really expect was a Belgium campaign group leveraging the opening of the Apple Store in Brussels to encourage organ donor registrations. Seems particularly dark, to be honest.

You’d never read the iTunes terms and conditions when installing or opening iTunes for the first time, but perhaps you’d read them in graphic novel format.

If you’re looking for something to play this weekend, The Room Three is now out for you to enjoy more physics and puzzle-solving goodness. It’s $7.99 on the Australian App Store, so go download it and enjoy.


Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2015/11/friday-morning-news061115/