Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/08/friday-morning-news110817/
New revelations about the next iPhone continue to appear, thanks to the HomePod firmware which Apple accidentally released to the public. This time around, we speculate that the home button area on the next iPhone will be able to hide and resize as required, supported by the discovery of certain APIs.
AppleInsider write that Apple’s Portrait mode camera effect will exit beta with iOS 11. When iOS 11 is released to the public in about a month, the main change to the mode will be that you’ll be able to turn the background blur effect on or off after the fact, provided you took the image with portrait mode in the first place.
A new rumour from Apple’s supply chain says we’ll see an updated iPhone SE sometime in early 2018. With Apple’s iPhone lineup likely getting a larger screen later this year, it’s entirely possible that they’ll want something for the crowd that prefers a smaller screen. Plenty of people prefer the one-handedness of the regular-sized iPhone, so it makes sense for Apple to update the hardware inside an SE form factor device, even if it doesn’t sell as well as the regular models.
The thing about the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro is that there just isn’t enough interesting stuff being done with it to warrant an entire article. So says TidBits, who points to this fact as one of the problems with the Touch Bar. It can, depending on the application, be more convenient than using your mouse to click on some UI element, but most of the Touch Bar interactions we’ve seen so far are pretty tame.
With the release of macOS High Sierra and the arrival of widespread APFS on the Mac looming large, one article says there APFS support in macOS 10.12 Sierra continues to be half-baked. While recent releases of APFS in 10.12.6 fix an earlier troublesome issue with filename normalisation (which would have broken compatibility with existing HFS+ volumes), APFS on Sierra can now pretty much only be used to read and write to and from APFS volumes.
Indeed, the Carbon Copy Cloner blog says APFS simply isn’t ready. Documentation on the filesystem from Apple is nowhere to be seen, making it hard for basic filesystem questions to be answered. There’s plenty of great features within APFS to look forward to, but until we know a little more about it, until it’s been a little more tested, the safer move is to not convert across come next month.
Stephen Hackett collected every colour of iMac G3 last year, but found himself with a bit of a storage problem. It turns out 13 iMac G3s take up a bit of space, so now they’re going to a new home — the Communications and Information Technology section at the Henry Ford Museum, where all 13 will be put on permanent display.
WorkOutDoors is a new app which allows you to store vectorised offline maps on your Apple Watch. If your Apple Watch has a GPS, you don’t even need your iPhone to see your location, making it an ideal choice for outdoor activity tracking where you need to know where you are.
A Procreate 4 preview gives us a look at what’s next for one of the best painting apps on the iPad platform. Re-engineered with Metal for improved performance, there’s a bunch of fantastic looking features with some iOS 11 extras tacked on for good measure. The wild thing is that this is going to be a free update? Crazy.