Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/11/friday-morning-news171117/
The iPhone X has been included on Time’s list of the 25 best inventions of 2017. It’s pretty easy to see why — a display that goes all the way to every edge, sophisticated facial recognition, and a design that removes the home button, a staple of every iPhone design up until this one. It’s not perfect, but for the first big departure to the iPhone design since the iPhone 6, it’s not bad. And I know no-one that has returned theirs, so it must be pretty OK.
Also from Time is an interview with Apple’s Chief Design Officer Jony Ive on the design of the iPhone X. In the interview, Ive says that designing the iPhone X meant that they had to solve “extraordinarily complex problems”, and while Ive sees a certain value in holding onto effective features, holding onto those at whatever cost is a path that leads to failure.
TechCrunch reports that Apple’s current VP of Diversity and Inclusion, Denise Young Smith, will be leaving the company at the end of the year. Her replacement will be Christie Smith who has worked at Deloitte in a similar role, focusing on talent management, organisational design, inclusion, and diversity. At Apple, she’ll report to Apple VP of People Deidre O’Brien.
Apple has been top notch with the iOS updates recently, and today’s release of iOS 11.1.2 continues that trend. The update is mostly for iPhone X users, fixing an issue where the screen would become unresponsive following rapid temperature drops, as well as fixing potential distortion when capturing Live Photos on the iPhone X. Provided no other urgent bugs need to be fixed, the next iOS update we should see is iOS 11.2.
GymKit wasn’t included as part of the watchOS 4 release despite being teased by Apple around the same time, but yesterday Apple’s director of health and fitness technologies Jay Blahnik showed off the technology at a Fitness First gym in Sydney’s CBD. Fitness First is currently deploying GymKit-compatible equipment in their Sydney and Melbourne locations, so we’ll have to wait and see if it catches on.
One of the frustrations of macOS High Sierra is the changed media keys — not only do they just control iTunes or whatever app is currently playing “media”, they also control video playback within apps. A fixer application restores the old behaviour, proxying commands to iTunes or Spotify so you can control your tunes once more.
You can now add your Velocity Frequent Flier membership card to Passbook, with official support from Virgin Australia. Their implementation is a little bare-bones as there’s no QR barcode to scan on the Passbook pass, but it does show your name, points balance, and membership tier.
MacStories tells us about Focos, a new app that lets you adjust depth effects after the shot has been taken. You can, of course, take Portrait-style photos with the app, but the real interesting stuff happens when you edit existing Portrait photos, where you can change what part of the image is in focus.
Karan Varidani talks about Apple’s fun-filled Clips app as the new Photo Booth. While it doesn’t quite have the casual appeal of Photo Booth, Clips wins hands-down in the simple editing stakes, where it’s much easier to create videos a few seconds long that can then be posted to social media.
Apple’s latest ad tells us what’s a computer. The ad shows off the editing capabilities of the iPad Pro, iOS 11, and the Apple Pencil.