Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2018/07/wednesday-morning-news110718/
A rumour from BGR said Apple was on the verge of deploying 1Password to all of its employees worldwide, with the potential acquisition also being discussed. While the 1Password Twitter account later denied any acquisition rumours, it’s still possible that acqusition talks took place between the two companies, which raises further questions about what kind of deployment Apple will be doing with 1Password. The deployment that BGR describes is strangely detailed, which means there’s a higher likelihood that there’s truth to some of this.
The US House Energy and Commerce Committee sent questions to Apple and Google regarding how they handle customer data. While recent media reports shed light on Android’s extensive collection of user data to facilitate various features, the House wanted to know if Apple employed similar practices with its devices and services. The full list of questions is available via PDF, and no company has responded just yet.
Ars Technica brings us the story of an interesting bug in iOS that was just fixed in the latest release, iOS 11.4.1. According to Ars, Apple added code years ago, probably to appease the Chinese government, to place restrictions on displaying the Taiwanese flag emoji when certain region and language settings were set. That was all documented by Apple and completely above-board, but a bug in this behaviour meant apps crashing, even when a device’s primary region or language was not China.
The future of the iPhone SE remains unclear, with the latest rumour claiming that the device will be discontinued in September. That’s contrary to previous rumours which said the device would see a hardware refresh, but given that the iPhone SE hasn’t been updated beyond its initial release besides a price cut and larger storage capacities, it’s hard to know what Apple’s strategy for the device is.
Apple has released the transcripts of this year’s WWDC session videos. Searching via keyword is available, see all instances where a keyword is mentioned within a video, and what’s more, the transcripts are linked to their videos so you can click and jump directly to that part of the video. It’s a great addition to an already good resource for developers.
As part of their week of App Store, MacStories takes us through 10 years of App Store changes. At first, the App Store resembled a re-skin of the iTunes storefront with a few app-specific niceties, but over time, Apple added features such as in-app purchases, iPad-specific apps, and eventually a few new coats of paint that came with larger overall changes to the design of iOS.
A timeline of notable App Store numbers from MacRumors gives us a similar perspective about just how far the App Store has come since its introduction in 2008. It’s pretty wild to think that most of the apps were paid when the App Store first launched, and how different the App Store landscape is now, billions of downloads, and billions paid to developers, later.
While we’re talking about classics, an open source effort called Classic Mac Finder looks to recreate the classic Finder look of System 6 and System 7. I guess this might be useful if you’re looking for a simpler file browsing experience, but you can pry my Finder tabs from my cold, dead, hands.
New iPad ads from Apple shows off the capabilities of the iPad across variety of situations. The iPad is good at travel, is good at notes, is good at paperwork, and is good at portability, they say.