Programming Note: This little website will be taking a break for the next two days. Regular programming will return on Monday, June 1st, when we will go through tons of WWDC predictions and speculations and guesses and rumor mongerings.
The idea is similar to Apple’s own Photos app and iCloud Photo Library. Google is automatically backing up and syncing photo and video libraries using Google Drive storage and not local device storage, but Google’s killer feature for its version comes down to price: Google Photos is completely free.
Without any subscription free or access charge, Google will backup and sync your photo collection across your devices and the web while maintaining photo quality up to 16MP and video quality up to 1080p.
We aspire to do for photo management what Gmail did for email management. Gmail wasn’t the first email service. But it offered a different paradigm of how one managed one’s inbox. We want to do that for photo management: To give you enough storage so you can relax and not worry about how much photo bandwidth you’re consuming, and enough organizing power so you don’t have to think about the tedium of managing your digital gallery.
The company uses this data to sell to advertisers, and advertisers in turn get a much closer look at you, your spending habits, and your daily activities. For some people, this is a perfectly reasonable tradeoff for "free", and that's your call. But many others sign up for these services without ever quite realizing what they've given away.
I've been testing Todoist on my Apple Watch for the past couple of weeks, and, much to my surprise, the idea of checking off tasks from my wrist has grown on me. Perhaps more importantly, having the ability to glance at my todo list, receive timely but unobtrusive reminders, and dictate new tasks has turned Todoist into a more personal companion that's always with me but that doesn't demand for constant attention.
Makes transcribing interviews less painful.
Pinpoint builds on the design and feature set of Bugshot and it adds new editing tools and initial iOS 8 integration. The app launches to a grid of recent screenshots from your device; tap one to start annotating it, choosing from four tools at the top.
The Google Places API for iOS, first launched in beta mode a few months back, is now available to all developers and will be arriving soon in a number of notable iOS apps. The API lets devs tap into Google’s database of points of interest.
The added support for the iPhone comes as Google has added support for iOS to its Cardboard SDK for developers. This means that iPhone apps can now include virtual reality experiences when paired with the Cardboard viewer.
Cardboard isn’t a perfect VR headset. It won’t be the last one you ever buy. It’s just supposed to be the first one, the gateway drug, the impulse-buy-at-the-supermarket-checkout device that makes you realize how amazing this technology can and will be.
Development for the Apple Watch requires a slight paradigm shift in both design and implementation, but in many ways those changes are beneficial for the end user and for the developer. It isn’t without its shortcomings - the Watch’s Bluetooth connection is unreliable and painfully slow at times, so smaller requests and limited communication between the Watch and Phone are essential to a responsive app. None of these obstacles are impossible to work through - it just requires the developer to streamline an application’s feature set and how information is presented to the user.
While saying some allegations against the monitor Michael Bromwich "give pause," the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said a lower court judge did not abuse her discretion in rejecting Apple's bid to end his two-year appointment early.
Apple’s new wearable may or may not be a big hit. But either way, it’s a harbinger of a new class of truly personal devices whose users will demand customized experiences. News companies aren’t ready to provide them.
Today is the first time I answered a phone call on my Mac, thanks to Apple's what-do-you-call-it Yosemite feature.
(Yes, it took that long for this combination to occur: 1. I am working on my Mac, 2. my iPhone is far away in the kitchen, and 3. someone actually called me on the phone.)
“Steve [Jobs] failed for 10 years; he struggled and failed and he was humiliated by the press after he left Apple. A lot of people today don’t realize it. They know how successful he is today, but they don’t realize how hard he worked to make the comeback.”
I’d tweet that Google has X more number of women on stage relative to Apple, but you can’t multiply by 0.
— Ben Thompson (@benthompson) May 28, 2015Thanks for reading.