Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/11/tuesday-morning-news281117/
As part of the tenth anniversary of Urban Sketchers, on-location artists who have increasingly started using iPad Pros with the Apple Pencil for their art, Apple is offering Today at Apple sketch walks hosted by prominent members of the Urban Sketchers community. The special sketch walks will be hosted by Uma Kelkar in San Francisco, Rob Sketcherman in Hong Kong, Don Low in Singapore, and Omar Jamarillo in Berlin.
Hundreds of iOS users are now complaining about another autocorrect bug, which results in the word “it” being auto-corrected to “I.T”. A similar issue sees “is” being auto-corrected to “I.S”, and this time around, adding it as both a shortcut and replacement text isn’t guaranteed to fix the issue. Two incidents of autocorrect issues in the same month is hardly something to be freaking out about, but it is somewhat concerning.
There’s another Apple Store opening this weekend, with the Brooklyn store in New York featuring signage that says “we’ve got something special in store” and “a brand new Apple Store is coming soon”. The smart money is on a store redesign in line with the revamped Apple Store layout, but we’ll have to wait and see until the official reveal on the weekend.
Two of the major Cydia repos have shut down in as many weeks, which some say is a sign of the times as jailbreaking fades in popularity. The BigBoss repo is now the only source that is still active within Cydia if you’re still interested in adding a bunch of unofficial tweaks to your device, but I feel as though people lost interest after learning it was more trouble than it was generally worth.
YouTube’s latest app update promises a fix for a battery drain issue that only affected devices running iOS 11. Something within the app itself resulted in vastly increased battery drain, with devices also heating up after watching videos. Clearly the app was doing something, but what? Either way, it’s fixed now, or so YouTube says.
Google has updated their Docs, Slides, and Sheets apps for the iPhone X and iOS 11, bringing the edge-to-edge display compatibility that we’ve all been waiting for, as well as drag-and-drop support when running on an iPad with iOS 11. While it seems interesting that Google would update their productivity suite before Gmail and Google Maps apps for iPhone X compatibility, it’s probably more likely that they were already working on a Docs/Slides/Sheets update when the iPhone X was released.
Macworld says the HomePod is looking more and more like the return of the iPod Hi-Fi, and that’s a really bad thing. While the iPod Hi-Fi still enjoys popularity among Apple enthusiasts today, as a product it was flawed, released into a market that didn’t want it. HomePod’s Siri capabilities seem hamstrung compared to Amazon Echo devices or Google Home, both of which are much more capable when it comes to processing information, and don’t require handing information off to a mobile device.
A story from a little while ago says Nintendo weren’t happy with the 200 million downloads of Super Mario Run, with the company saying that their first iOS title didn’t result in acceptable profits. On the other hand, Fire Emblem Heroes, a more “traditional” free-to-play game compared to the single large in-app purchase of Super Mario Run, has been more lucrative for the company.
Another super old article from Ben Brooks (I’m clearing out my feed reader here) comments on Tim Cook as CEO of Apple. For investors and members of the board, the sole metric by which Tim Cook is judged should be Apple’s stock price, and in that respect, Cook is the best CEO yet. Not only has he kept an insane trajectory started by Steve Jobs going, he’s also taken two dips in stock price in stride and made gains on top of those.
Apple’s latest videos show off Face ID and Animoji on the iPhone X, and they’re now available to watch on Apple’s YouTube channel.