Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2018/04/thursday-morning-news050418/
Another report from Bloomberg says Apple is looking to build devices with touchless gesture controls and curved screens. While being able to hover your digits over a phone screen and have it do things would be pretty cool, a number of other smartphone manufacturers already make devices with slightly curved displays, and while the iPhone X’s OLED display falls into the latter category, curved phones may only be a few years away.
The New York Times writes Apple has hired Google’s chief of Search and Artificial Intelligence. It’s claimed John Giannandrea will run Apple’s machine learning and AI efforts, becoming one of 16 Apple execs who report directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Giannandrea was previously CTO of Metaweb when it was acquired by Google in 2010, and in an email to Apple employees, Cook said that Giannandrea shares Apple’s commitment to privacy and their thoughtful approach as computers become increasingly ingrained in our lives.
9to5Mac has an interview with Rob Janoff, the creator of the colourful Apple logo. These days the Apple logo has dropped the colours and may look a little more refined since the days it was emblazoned on beige pizza-shaped boxes, and his thoughts on creating timeless work are painted with a particularly grounded brush, by which I mean his comment about designers creating things to have hidden meanings is often not true, as designers often have enough trouble as it is to create something that looks “halfway decent”.
CNBC tells us about Jim Reeks, the audio designer who is now responsible for many of the sounds you hear in macOS. You’re probably already familiar with the story behind the “Sosumi” beep, the Mac startup chime (one of the few sounds that is trademarked, as I’ve now learned), and finally, the iOS camera shutter sound — which sounds a lot like a Canon AE-1, probably because that’s what the sound was originally recorded from.
High-level Apple execs recently saw Restricted Stock Units vest, worth up to US $22 million each. AppleInsider has the individual figures from Apple’s filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, but the long and the short of it is that Apple COO Jeff Williams, SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller, SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue, SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi, and SVP of Hardware Engineering Dan Riccio all just became a little richer.
Apple has updated its support article on preparing for changes to macOS Server. The writing has been on the wall since January, when the KB article was first published, but the article has now been updated to say that a number of services have been moved to macOS High Sierra, some have been removed entirely, and some will be removed at a future date.
Apple Music now has 40 million paying subscribers, which is two million more than the last time we heard about Apple Music’s subscription numbers from Eddy Cue at SXSW. The numbers suggest Apple Music new user growth is still going strong, or even climbing month-on-month.
The Verge, in praising Apple for Swift Playgrounds and its position as an introduction to programming, wonders if Apple is teaching kids to code or just teaching them about code. They point out that while you can certainly learn about and write code within Swift Playgrounds, you can’t build an app. And as any iOS developer will tell you, building something from scratch is very different to playing with a few lines inside of a friendly interface.
Looking through some older archives from the shutdown of Digg Reader, I came across an article from 2014 on the past, present, and the future of the Aqua interface. It’s interesting to look back and see what macOS used to look like, whether you enjoy the current trend of frosted glass and translucency or not.
Four new Apple Pay on iPhone X ads were released by Apple. They’re all 12-second shorts showing off the speed and convenience of Apple Pay, and if I hadn’t already changed banks to take advantage of Apple Pay, these videos might have convinced me to.