Tuesday Morning News

iPhone-7-design-drawingIf the rumours are true, the next iPhone will look more or less identical to the current iPhone. Has iPhone design reached a point where we can’t go any thinner, where there are no more innovations to be had in terms of a different look and feel every two years? That said, the design drawing claims the iPhone will have the same length and width as the iPhone 6.

A dummy unit that could very well be faked shows what the next iPhone might look like. There’s the re-located antenna bands on the back, a camera lens that’s flush with the casing, a the echoes of a Smart Connector interface that may or may not be included, depending on how the rumour blogs are feeling today.

Even before Apple has confirmed they’re working on an Apple car, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Chief Design Officer Jony Ive have been named as some of the most influential people in automotive tech. Time’s vehicle-related offshoot The Drive recently published the list, which includes Cook and Ive due to their work on CarPlay, as well as whatever they’re working on behind the curtain.

The jury’s still out on whether the next iPhone will ditch the 3.5mm headphone jack in favour of a Lightning-only port. MacRumors decide to test the waters by seeing how Lightning-compatible headphones measure up to their analog counterparts, and the good news is, sound quality appears to be better. But on the minus side, there just aren’t many Lightning-only headphones out there, although I’m sure Apple has a Lightning-enabled pair of EarPods floating around in Cupertino.

Meanwhile, 9to5Mac takes a look at a Lightning-enabled Shure condenser microphone. Their review of the MV5 says it’s a compact unit that works with your iOS device or Mac, and the relatively cheap cost of the microphone means it’s a decent choice for portable podcasting.

A concept of what an iTunes redesign might look like puts an even greater focus on blending album art into the interface, as well as being able to browse in a space-less grid of album art.

Jared Sinclair rethinks Apple Music, saying that the service needs to answer questions and serve a specific purpose, rather than just being somewhere you can stream music.

Analysis of historical iPhone screen sizes versus sales tells the story of the longevity of the 4-inch display, despite the popularity of larger-screened iPhones. Is it the one-handedness of the smaller iPhones that make them more popular?

MacStories tells us about Tweetbot 4.3, which introduces a “topics” feature for easier linked tweets on a particular topic. They also check out Annotatable, calling it the most versatile image annotation tool for iOS.

The latest Apple ad features Neil Patrick Harris rehearsing his thank you speech with the help of hands-free Siri.


Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/05/tuesday-morning-news100516/

If iTunes looks anything like that I for one will not be using it, I barely use my iPhone for music as it is and I can play all my music at home with Plex which has a much nicer interface in my opinion.

I have already replaced my Apple TVs with Raspberry Pi’s running RasPlex as I find the interface much nicer and the fact that I don’t have to manually tag media is a relief! It is so much easier to navigate the amount of media that I have using a well designed interface (particularly for TV series) than it is on Apple TV - and before someone says try Plex on the Apple TV - I have seen it and the interface is awful.

A list of songs works so well, sorting it by album date or play count or name or track number seems so simple i can’t understand why they are so hell bent on making it all picture based. Unless they truly are trying to make everything in mac os touchable and small lists aren’t the best in that world

As a long-time Plex user (over close to 10 years, starting with XBMC) and a someone who recently purchased an AppleTV, the inferace is far from horrible.

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The Apple TV interface is OK but I don’t really like it’s Plex interface, I find the interface that RasPlex uses far nicer.