Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/07/friday-morning-news010716/
Over at Recode, Spotify says Apple is “using the App Store as a weapon”. The streaming music company says Apple has rejected a new version of their iOS app, but the article isn’t clear on why the app was rejected. The consensus seems to be Spotify wanted to remove the option for in-app subscriptions to Spotify altogether — which came at a premium over web subscriptions due to Apple’s 30% cut — but Apple rejected the app on those grounds. Shouldn’t app developers get to choose when they offer subscriptions or not?
Apple has collaborated with NASA to produce and promote a short music video celebrating NASA’s Juno spacecraft reaching Jupiter’s orbit. The Visions of Harmony music video was created alongside a new Discover: Jupiter section in Apple Music in order to foster education about space exploration.
The South Korean Fair Trade Commission is investigating Apple for possible anti-competitive practices relating to unfair contracts with mobile telcos. Apple wants carriers in South Korea to commit to minimum purchase volumes, as well as contributing to repair costs. Apple was found guilty of doing the same thing in France, where it was fined to the tune of US $8.8 million, along with having to pay US $54 million back to carriers.
9to5Mac has a video of multiple devices listening to “Hey Siri” voice prompts, but with only one device activating Siri. Their video shows an iPad responding to the voice prompt, while an iPhone shows the Siri overlay for the briefest of moments. I’m assuming that this also works if you have two or more iPhones, which is a pretty cool use of the technology.
A piece from Buzzfeed in the middle of last month says that Apple is now designing things with women in mind. Which is great and all, as it heralds the end of “Apple man”.
Backblaze enlisted Peter Cohen to write a primer on Filevault, the whole-disk encryption used by Macs. While iOS devices have had encryption turned on by default ever since iOS 8, turning whole-disk encryption on your Mac has a few extra caveats that you will want to be aware of, or risk losing all your files.
MacStories reviews two Wikipedia apps for Mac and iOS. Qwiki is a Wikipedia research tool that sits in your menu bar, which is focused on getting in and getting out of the article that you’re after. On the iOS side of the fence, there’s Wonder, but I’m not sure how it’s significantly better than the official Wikipedia app, which is also pretty great.
Facebook is killing Paper, the news feed app that, to the best of my knowledge, was never even available outside of the US. Cool.
A collection of moments where Steve Jobs expressed emotion on stage really shows how much pressure the leader was under, when all eyes were on Apple’s every move.
A small teaser for tomorrow’s Good Reads comes from Ars Technica, who tell us about the times ZFS almost became the next file system for Macs. Now there’s AFPS, which will take some ideas from ZFS and make them scale to every Apple device in the lineup.