Thursday Morning News

Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/07/thursday-morning-news210716/
Scrivener iconApple’s latest acquisition is cloud-based music provider Omnifone, or at least so it appears. There’s been no confirmation from Apple about it buying the music service used by many telcos for partnerships, and even the original report only hinted at the suggestion Omnifone had been purchased for $10 million. Omnifone previously powered Sony’s Music Unlimited service and BlackBerry’s BBM Music, as well as Samsung’s Milk music service, but all Apple was after were its patents.

They’re about a day later than I expected, but the second public beta of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra have been released to members of Apple’s public beta testing program. The releases match the third developer betas of the same software released on Tuesday, meaning you can now hear the new keyboard clicks and use the “rest finger to open” after unlocking with Touch ID.

Apple Pay has made its debut in Hong Kong, offering full support for American Express, Mastercard, and Visa across five major banks, with two more on the way. Hong Kong becomes the ninth market to support Apple’s mobile payments solution.

Over at MacStories, a few interesting points about the App Store’s top grossing chart explores some of the differences between the apps that are making the most money. A tiny fraction of the top 200 grossing apps require up-front payment, with the rest being free with in-app purchases, and similarly, only a tiny percentage offer no in-app purchases at all. Games also account for more than two-thirds of the top 200 grossing.

Now that we have auto-unlocking with the Apple Watch and macOS Sierra, Six Colors wonders why we don’t have auto-locking. They say it would make sense when you’re using your computer in semi-public spaces and need to walk away for a minute.

Sonos has announced support for Plex, meaning that you’ll now be able to view your Plex music library from within the Sonos app. The update enables wireless streaming of your Plex music library to your Sonos devices.

Scrivener for iOS has been released, and the $31 writing app is probably worth the price for any kind of serious writing projects that you want to do on the iPhone or iPad. Macworld has a short review of Scrivener for iOS, although you’ll want the updated desktop app if you want the two to talk to each other.

While Scrivener is making the jump from Mac to iOS, Letterpress is going the other way and making the jump from iOS to Mac. Letterpress for Mac is by the company who acquired the app from Loren Brichter many moons ago, and it appears to have all the same features as its iOS counterpart.

The Indian government will officially approve laws that allow retailers such as Apple to set up shop without having to sell a certain percentage of locally-sourced products. Apple is the first company to have been granted a three-year extension on the rule, however the Indian government is expected to allow similar companies to do likewise.

The latest Shot on iPhone ads from Apple show off the video capabilities of the iPhone by everyday folks.

Letterpress for Mac? Weird.