Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/06/thursday-morning-news230616/
Headphone jacks are the new floppy drives. Debate is heating up over Apple’s decision to remove the headphone jack from the next iPhone, both on the web and in our forums. Gruber says it’s almost inevitable that the headphone jack will go, so the only question that remains is: when? He says the decision isn’t about device thinness, but about advancing the technology, with only a few minor considerations if the headphone jack gets removed. A minor follow-up piece says there’s two sides to every coin, and in this case, you can be OK with Apple removing the headphone jack and complain about the short-term annoyances.
Ars Technica takes a look at the macOS Sierra developer preview, which mostly seems like a pretty minor update on the Mac side of things. Instead of being a feature-packed release, we get a few new headline features — Siri, better iOS device compatibility — and the rest builds on the foundation of OS X El Capitan.
A similar hands-on with macOS Sierra from Six Colors tells us about how much space we’ll save (which may be an issue now that Apple is increasingly moving towards solid-state storage), all the new Moments in the new Photos, and tabs and picture-in-picture aplenty.
The Verge’s preview of macOS Sierra says iCloud is almost fully baked into the system now, turning into a true first-class citizen instead of a service that’s just been tacked on as an afterthought. The ability for iCloud Drive to show you your desktop on other Macs will be incredibly useful for those with multiple machines and other devices.
For some reason, the kernel in iOS 10 developer preview is unencrypted. It hasn’t ever been released in an unencrypted state before, so this is either a monumental screw-up or a carefully planned manoeuvre to allow more eyes on the security features at the core of iOS.
The new Control Center in iOS 10 expands from one pane to three ones you can swipe between. While all the familiar stuff remains on the first and left-most pane, the “centre” pane features a more fleshed out music controller, complete with album art. Swipe again, and the right-most pane has Home integrations, negating the need to jump into an app to change your lights.
Opening up Messages to developers in the form of apps means developers can now tap into the most-used app on the iPhone. Just like what happened with Photos, developers will soon be building apps that can be sent as messages, which might just kill off GIF keyboards entirely. Stickers will run rampant for the first few months, but after that we might see some truly useful stuff.
The latest update to the Dropbox app now has document scanning via the camera, as well as the ability to create Office documents from your mobile.
NASA’s app for the Apple TV gives people a real-time view of the Earth from the International Space Station, and kind of makes me wish Apple allowed custom third-party screensavers, because that would be incredible.
The New Web argues Apple doesn’t understand photography. I’m inclined to agree, but maybe I’m not in Apple’s demographic of holiday-taking, happy-snapping, and family-sharing people. My selfies folder is empty, but I use the camera on my iPhone for remembering.