Thursday Morning News

Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/07/thursday-morning-news270717/

Rumours say the high-end iPhone that everyone’s been talking about won’t ship until later this year. It wouldn’t be surprising if Apple’s all-singing, all-dancing iPhone with all of the trimmings isn’t available until October through to December, which lines up with Apple’s Q1 2018. There’s also a high likelihood of a white model not being available at launch, just in case you thought stock shortages were going to be the only problem.

With all of this talk about Apple making factories in the US, Apple manufacturing partner Foxconn has revealed plans that it may be investing $7 billion in a Wisconsin-based manufacturing plant for flat-screen displays. Foxconn’s proposal says the factory would create between 30,000 and 50,000 jobs in the US, with Foxconn also receiving between $1 to $3 billion in incentives.

Speaking of Wisconsin, Apple has been ordered to pay $506 million to the University of Wisconsin for infringing a patent held by the university. The patent relates to technology found within the A7 and A8 series of iPhone processors, which contain a predictor circuit to improve performance by predicting what instructions a user will send to the system. While there’s a separate case for later series iPhone processors infringing the same patent, that won’t be tried until Apple has a chance to appeal the current ruling.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Sir Jony Ive has shared some design details about Apple Park and the new Apple campus. Ive says Apple has been working with arborists for years in advance to plan for over 9,000 draught-resistant trees that will be planted in Apple Park, and that’s just one small part of the exhaustive architectural process that has gone into Apple’s new campus. MacRumors has a quick summary.

Lesser-known Apple exec Todd Teresi, VP of Advertising Platforms, spoke at Seattle’s Postback conference about Apple’s switch away from iAds to Search Ads on the App Store. Search Ads, as much as they can be improved, were originally designed to improve App Store discoverability and Teresi reveals that the App Store has something like a 50% conversion rate.

Apple have worked with Cochlear to produce the first iPhone-compatible cochlear implant sound processor. While there are plenty of iPhone-compatible hearing aids already that can be tweaked via companion iPhone apps, those aren’t necessary for the device to work. Cochlear’s new sound processor features a “Find my Processor” feature to find your sound processor if you’ve misplaced it, which The Verge says will be useful for kids.

Kirk McElhearn tells us how to process batches of photos in Apple’s Photos app. There’s no batch processing feature, but applying the same changes to multiple photos might be close enough.

Google’s newest app for the iPhone is Trusted Contacts, a free Find My Friends-like app that offers cross-platform location sharing, as well as integration with the Google Maps “share location” feature. Trusted Contacts is free, on the App Store.

MacStories has a review of Streaks 3. There are now more goals than ever before, all without sacrificing the app’s ease of use and adhering to the app’s main goal of helping you form habits. Plus, Crunchy Bagel is Australian, so there’s that.

A post on Medium runs through the many varied ways of creating GIFs from your phone. If it all sounds too hard and all you want to do is share a GIF on Twitter, then the built-in Twitter app works pretty well for that kind of thing.

I didn’t want to put this in the main post so as to not attract too much attention, but you can read the Wall Street Journal’s breakdown here.

(It’s just the WSJ link with http://facebook.com/l.php?u= at the front. Sure, you’ll need a Facebook account, and Facebook will know you went to the link, but there’s a good chance they already did.)

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