Wednesday Morning News

Originally published at: https://appletalk.com.au/2018/09/wednesday-morning-news260918/

Qualcomm is accusing Apple of stealing confidential information relating to its LTE modems and trade secrets, saying Apple then passed them onto Intel to allow Apple to stop using Qualcomm modems in iPhones. Qualcomm’s court documents say the theft and subterfuge from Apple was quite extensive, with Apple allegedly participated in a “years-long campaign of false promises, stealth and subterfuge designed to steal Qualcomm’s confidential information and trade secrets for the purpose of improving the performance of lower-quality modem chipsets, with the ultimate goal of eliminating Qualcomm’s Apple-based business”. Qualcomm initially sued Apple in November last year based on suspicions Apple were using Qualcomm’s trade secrets in wrong ways, and now it seems it has more to back up its claims.

Owners of the iPhone XS and XS Max are complaining of Wi-Fi and LTE connectivity issues, although there are too many unknowns to narrow this down to any one specific cause. Some say it’s a telco issue, others theorise it has something to do with Intel vs Qualcomm modems, and it’s even possible that the difference in antenna configuration between the XS and XS Max and its predecessors could be accounting for the difference in signal strength and/or connection speed. Additionally, it seems that devices are preferring 2.4GHz Wi-Fi networks over their 5GHz counterparts when both have the same SSID.

Two new Apple support documents tell us about macOS Mojave support on older Macs. The first details macOS Mojave compatibility for the Mid 2010 and Mid 2012 models of Mac Pro, both of which require certain Metal-compatible graphics cards in order to be run Mojave. The second support article tells us that you’ll need to remove your Boot Camp partition on 27-inch Late 2012 iMacs with a 3TB hard drive before being able to install Mojave, and even after that, you won’t be able to install Windows using Boot Camp on that Mac in particular, necessitating the use of VMWare Fusion or Parallels.

Which might be why there’s a new version of VMWare Fusion out this week. VMWare Fusion 11 primarily adds support for the 18-core iMac Pro and the Core i9 in the MacBook Pro, also introducing a new application menu that lets you launch Windows apps from outside your VM. VMWare already uses Metal for its graphics APIs, giving it the one-up on Parallels which still relies on Apple’s OpenGL implementation.

Stephen Hackett says macOS Mojave makes the Mac more Mac-like, doubling down on many features that set the Mac apart from its Windows counterparts. Cover Flow might be dead, but lives on as Gallery View, Finder can now do some stuff for you outside of apps via Quick Actions, and there’s even potential for some truly great iOS apps to make their way across to the Mac sometime in the future.

But Ars says Dark Mode in macOS Mojave isn’t quite dark enough. It doesn’t need a foreboding background story, a tense build-up, or gratuitous amounts of graphic and unnecessary violence, but some would like it to be closer to black than the sort of semi-transparent black that we get now. A lot of that can be solved by turning off transparency, which gets us pretty close to a true dark mode.

MacRumors tells us about how to use the new Continuity Camera features in Mojave, which let you take pictures using your iOS device and use those shots on your Mac. There’s also a new document-scanning feature that leverages your iOS device in a similar way.

I’m giving props to David Smith’s Pedometer++ iOS app today, because it’s one of the very few third-party apps that supports all the new complication types on the Infograph and Infograph Modular watch faces on the Apple Watch Series 4. There are a bunch of Apple complications that haven’t made the jump yet, and while I’m waiting for other third party apps to catch up, I’ll be able to know how many steps I’ve taken.

Shortcuts Gallery has a bunch of cool shortcuts you can take a look at for inspiration, but one of the more interesting ones I came across was The Mansion, a text-based adventure game that uses iOS standard banner prompts to let you choose your own adventure.

If you’re still wondering where AirPower is, the fact that it’s mentioned on iPhone XS and XS Max packaging and code in iOS 12.1 should give you some hope that it’s still being worked on, however quietly, at Apple. I just wouldn’t be holding your breath for a release this year.