Monday Morning News

Originally published at: https://appletalk.com.au/2019/03/monday-morning-news040319/

Apple’s previous Shot on iPhone campaign featured shots from iPhone photography all over the world, as judged by world-renowned photographers. Their latest is a little more targeted, this time performed in partnership with the NHL to feature shots taken by players on billboards outside arenas. Eight NHL teams are currently participating in Apple’s latest Shot on iPhone ad campaign, with billboards outside arenas being backed by posts on social media.

Apple is doing something good for International Women’s Day, highlighting stories of successful women and partnering with Girls Who Code to expand learning opportunities for young women. Today at Apple sessions at Apple Stores around the world will feature special "Made By Women" series, with select locations becoming host to sessions with creators. Curated content will be the flavour of the month across all of Apple’s services, including Apple Music, Beats 1, Apple Podcasts, Apple Books, as well as the iTunes Store, and on the 8th March, every Apple Watch user who completes an activity of 1.6KM or more will earn this month’s Activity Award.

With foldable technology now entering the spotlight, a recent Apple patent tells us about how Apple plans a problem relating to folding displays. It’s said that by heating the foldable part of the display, this will prevent damage when folding or un-folding the display, depending on certain conditions. There’s also some info on a magnetic latch to keep the two halves of the device closed when folded.

Developers will soon be able to offer discounted subscriptions to current and past customers, which will no doubt be nice now that seemingly every app is moving to a subscription model for revenue over time. The change will come as part of iOS 12.2, with more flexible subscription pricing overall being part of the changes, allowing developers to have up to 10 different promotional prices per subscription.

The Apple Retail Store in Bondi, Sydney will be renovated starting later this month on March 24. There’s no word on what the renovations will entail, but it’s likely that the store will be brought up to the same standard that include a Today at Apple forum space, wood-panelled display walls, and large video wall. It’ll join Chadstone, Adelaide, and Robina as the fourth upgraded Apple Store in Australia.

Back in the day, on a little site called MacTalk, there was a label and title of InGenius. While the details of that particular tale have been lost to the annals of history, iFixit has launched their own genius campaign called I’m A Genius. It’s aimed at empowering everyone to repair their own electronics with detailed guides, all the parts you need, and perhaps best of all, no blue shirt required.

Did you hear the one about how certain Epson printers now have support for Siri Shortcuts? The idea is that you can now trigger prints using just your voice, but as much as I enjoy adopting new technologies, I feel as though this is perhaps one of the worst possible combinations; instead of one useless piece of technology, we now have two.

Macworld points out the old guard of indie Mac apps. It’s crazy to think that there are some developers still making Mac apps, and have been doing so from the very beginning. But there’s probably a reason BBEdit, PCCalc, and some others I haven’t heard of are still around today.

The team behind the fantastic third-party camera app Halide is back with a new app, and Spectre sounds incredible. It’s computational photography at its best, allowing you to do things like hand-held long-exposures, creating light trails, removing people from photos, and other stuff you’d normally have to have a more expensive camera to do. MacStories has all the details.

9to5Mac wonders about the mystery of the Beats AirPlay 2 speaker. Such a device was announced on stage just before the HomePod reveal, but so far hasn’t seen the light of day. While Beats does have headphones with Apple’s W2 chip, Beats current doesn’t offer any Wi-Fi compatible speakers, so this would be a first for the company. Perhaps that’s why it’s taking so long.

I wonder how this is different to their usual repair guides (which are excellent, helped me with my Macbook upgrades)

[edit] Not quite what I thought it would be. #imagenius :slight_smile: