Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2018/01/friday-morning-news120118/
Another TV series is on the way from Apple, with “See” being the latest in their scripted TV acquisitions. Little is known about the TV series besides how it’s a world-building drama set in the future, and it’s also from the same studio that produces “Are You Sleeping”, which Apple also picked up recently. No date has been set for any of these original programming efforts to premiere, but it’s possible that we’ll see at least one of them later this year.
MacRumors has a roundup of what to expect from Apple this year. Their guesses are all pretty standard, following the pattern of yearly iOS and macOS releases, along with some hardware updates, with some speculation on products that we might see. Given Apple’s software problems of late, I’m interested to see whether we’ll get major updates to Apple’s software this year, or what will happen if we don’t.
A federal case investigating the mysterious Fruitfly Mac malware that silently infected hundreds of computers for up to a decade reveals details about what it did. Unfortunately, there’s no good news — it turns out Fruitfly was one of the worst kinds of spyware, turning on cameras, microphones, taking and downloading screenshots, logging keystrokes, and steal every kind of record from computers.
Siri’s latest trick is being able to answer questions about tennis and golf tournament results, ahead of the Australian Open starting this weekend. That’s nice and all, but with Australia’s most-followed sports still not making the cut I don’t see this as something to get excited about. Maybe if you’re a tennis or golf tournament fan.
Hip-hop artist RZA (yes, that RZA) will be hosting a Music Lab session at the San Francisco Apple Store later this month. Developing Your Sound with RZA will focus on the techniques that RZA uses to develop new music, the session is said to be focusing on using the iPad Pro, Garageband, and smart instrument maker Roli’s own accessories to create music.
With Apple migrating iCloud user data to a Chinese GCBD-controlled location, many users have found themselves included as a migration target, despite their iCloud accounts said to have been opened and tied to an overseas billing address. Apple support reps claim this is a result of the migration being targeted to users with devices that are currently set to the China region, regardless of whether their iCloud account is registered or billed to.
Apple has opened up membership fee waivers for its App Development Program for nonprofit organisations, educational institutions, and government entities. It seems the waiver is currently only available in the US, but Apple has said it will be opening the waiver program up to other regions soon. It’s a great move that should lower the barrier for the creation of great apps.
The good news is, screen burn-in tests performed on recent OLED smartphone displays found that the iPhone X was the least susceptible to burn-in. Testing of the iPhone X, Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S7 Edge over a screen-torturing 510 hours revealed minor burn-in on the iPhone X after just 17 hours, but nothing that was visible in regular usage.
The best stand-alone fitness app for the Apple Watch is Workouts++, according to The Sweet Setup, who awarded the app based on it’s customisable interface, support for Apple’s Health app, and a minimal amount of bugs for some of it’s smarter features.
For a laugh, take a look at the listed price of the Space Grey accessories on eBay from iMac Pro owners that presumably don’t care about what colour their accessories are. I can’t recommend picking up a set due to their increasing commonality, but maybe Apple will sell them separately one day.