Thursday Morning News

Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/05/thursday-morning-news250517/

The launch of Apple’s app development curriculum for high school and community college students is both a way to get students into programming and providing the necessary material for them to do so. Offered as a free download from the iBooks Store, App Development with Swift teaches students elements of app design, and what’s more, six community colleges in the US will be offering the course to close to half a million students.

Now that we’re well into the iPhone rumour cycle, sketchy leaks have started appearing. The latest of these (but not nearly these last) show off a device which appears to have the same vertically-aligned dual camera arrangement, but with what looks to be a rear Touch ID sensor. It’s possible that Apple could have deliberately leaked the rear Touch ID sensor design to one of its manufacturing partners, but also as likely is that this company manufactured prototypes based on an earlier model.

Intel has announced plans to increase industry adoption of Thunderbolt 3 by releasing the specs under a non-exclusive, royalty-free license. If everything goes according to plan, this should have the knock-on effect of increased Thunderbolt 3 uptake among third-party manufacturers, and if that doesn’t work, Intel will also be integrating Thunderbolt 3 into future CPUs.

DigiTimes says Apple will be manufacturing small quantities of microLED this year. MicroLED technology is seen as the next logical step after OLED in terms of display technology, with the Apple Watch expected to be one of the first devices to adopt the new tech.

There’s a new firmware update for AirPods, which can be downloaded and applied to your AirPods by going opening up Settings, General, then About, then AirPods while they are connected to your iOS device. It’s not known what the firmware update is supposed to do, but if I was a betting man, I’d put good money on performance improvements and bug fixes. Or something along those lines.

Apple has added four new videos to their “how to shoot on iPhone 7” webpage. Topics covered in the new short videos include how to convert photos to black and white, how to use the iPhone zoom, shooting a horizon, and capturing an intimate moment.

In what’s either a scathing post about the capabilities of Google Assistant or the first-party integration of Siri, AppleInsider says the arrival of Google Assistant on the iPhone won’t replace Siri any time soon. It’s probably a little of both.

Dash for iOS has been added back to the App Store, with the app’s developer registering a personal developer account and uploading the official version himself, following plenty of developers adding their own versions to the App Store.

1Password now has a travel mode for everyone that has a 1Password subscription, which lets you designate certain vaults as “safe for travel”. Vaults that aren’t explicitly designated as “safe for travel” are removed from your device, but the real WTF is that this is even an option that we need in 2017.

In discussing Safari vs Chrome on the Mac, Gruber’s footnotes are more than double the length of the original article once the quoted text is removed. There’s very little difference between the two, he says, and which one you use will largely depend on how much you’re tied into each platform.