Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/05/friday-morning-news120517/
With the sleep-tracking company acquisition, one sleep expert has left Apple. Roy Raymann worked on the Night Shift and Bedtime features at Apple, but has since left to take the VP of Sleep Science position at SleepScore Labs. It’s interesting to note that MacRumors speculates Apple could be using the sleep tracking data from its Beddit acquisition, too.
At Microsoft’s Build developer event, the company announced that iTunes would be coming to the Windows Store. While iTunes for Windows has been a thing for years, and you can just go to Apple’s website and download it for free, it’s a significant step for Microsoft’s plans for the Windows Store. It begs the question, though: why isn’t iTunes available on the Mac App Store?
An Apple patent describes using iMessage to communicate with Siri in noisy or silent environments. Being able to use Siri without using your voice would be a major plus, for those times you need to communicate with your virtual assistant. Maybe in the future we’ll have some kind of virtual assistant that we can communicate with telepathically.
Renders of the next iPhone based on CAD schematics of cases give us some idea of how the final product will look, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. The design does look slightly bigger than the current iPhone design, but without any reference for scale it’s kind of hard to tell.
A leak from a Chinese website claims some upcoming iPhone will be using Ion-X glass as a rear casing, similar to the iPhone 4/4s design. AppleInsider notes that the glass back cases found in the photo don’t contain the second hole for a camera lens as found in previous leaks, prompting speculation they’re for some upcoming iPhone SE refresh.
Rich notifications are now part of the Apple Support iOS app, letting you reply to chats right from within the app. Yesterday’s update also allows you to schedule repairs at Authorised Apple Service Providers, although I haven’t heard whether this is something that works in Australia or not, but on the plus side, you can now make a Genius Bar reservation at Apple Stores in Hong Kong, China, Macau, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.
Ukraine-based MacPaw are now the owners of the TekServe Apple collection. The MacPaw CEO purchased all of the machines in TekServe’s collection before they ended up in someone’s basement or were sold off individually, and now most of the Macs are on display at the MacPaw offices in Kiev, while others are undergoing a restoration project. Guess which city just made it on my fictional Europe travel list?
Jason Yuan was rejected for a graphic design internship at Apple Music, so he redesigned it. Note that we’re talking about the default iOS music app here, not the music-streaming service, even though they share the same name. Anyway, Yuan has some good ideas about how the app should look and feel, making improvements here and there to create a much more pleasant looking, easy-to-use app for both music discovery and music playing.
Apple Music is now promoting some of its content as GIFs via its own Giphy account. You can browse the collection on the web, or use the GIFs within your iMessage conversations with the official Giphy app.