MyAppleMenu - Sat, Nov 7, 2015

Sat, Nov 7, 2015The Coffee-Table Edition

Apple Sends 'Shot On iPhone 6' Photographers Special Edition Art Books Containing Their Work, by Mikey Campbell, AppleInsider

In a thank you to photographers whose pictures were used as part of Apple's "Shot on iPhone 6" ad campaign, the company is sending out special coffee table books containing a page-by-page collection of selected works and their respective installations around the world.

A nice gesture from Apple indeed, while there are other media companies that don't even bother to give proper credits.

User Data Plundering By Android And iOS Apps Is As Rampant As You Suspected, by Dan Goodlin, Ars Technica

Apps in both Google Play and the Apple App Store frequently send users' highly personal information to third parties, often with little or no notice, according to recently published research that studied 110 apps.

Stuff

Apple Launches New Shopping Category In The App Store Promoting Apple Pay, by Mike Beasley, 9to5Mac

As the inclusion of these apps demostrates, the section can be used to track down not only products, but also deals, coupons, and auctions.

Just in time for Black Friday.

Put A Lock And Key On Your Message With Secure Text Keyboard, by Sandy Stachowiak, AppAdvice

This tool allows you to encrypt your text and only your recipient has the key to unlock your message.

I'm not sure how good this is, but it is worth examining third-party solutions if you don't even trust Apple.

An App For Booking Babysitters, by Jonah Bromwich, New York Times

For teenagers, babysitting is often the first thing that comes to mind when brainstorming ways to earn a little extra spending money. But digitally savvy adolescents will not be surprised to find they have extra competition these days.

Plex Is A Must-Have Personal Media Server For The Apple TV, by Dennis Sellers, Apple World Today

Plex — the all-in-one, network agnostic media sharing server — has come to the new Apple TV via the tvOS App Store. Though the set-up process is a little com-Plex (snicker), this is a great solution for streaming your own media to just about any device you own.

How To Add A Location To Pictures In Photos For Mac, by OS X Daily

Develop

SketchParty TV For The New Apple TV: The Story So Far, by matt Braun, Medium

It took about five weeks of evening and weekend work to get SketchParty TV ready for the new Apple TV. My first submission was rejected pretty quickly for the same reason many others have been: the reviewers at Apple are really good about testing all the scenarios for Menu button presses on the Siri Remote. It was a non-trivial change to do some additional state tracking, and I ended up pulling an all-nighter four days before the Apple TV App Store was going to go live. But I got it in on time!

Why Is Swift's String API So Hard?, by Mike Ash

Swift's String type takes an unusual approach to strings. Many other languages pick one canonical representation for strings and leave you to fend for yourself if you want anything else. Often they simply give up on important questions like "what exactly is a character?" and pick something which is easy to work with in code but which sugar-coats the inherently difficult problems encountered in string processing. Swift doesn't sugar-coat it, but instead shows you the reality of what's going on. This can be difficult, but it's no more difficult than it needs to be.

Notes

Disney Is Finally Getting That Apps Are The Future Of TV, by Julia Greenberg, Wired

This week, another old-media powerhouse signaled that it gets this is how TV’s future will go down. Disney chairman and chief executive Bob Iger said yesterday that the company, which owns ABC and sports behemoth ESPN, is looking at apps, too. “We’re also very interested in taking products directly to consumers,” Iger said in a call with investors, adding that Disney is launching an on-demand subscription app, DisneyLife, later this year in the UK.

The gatekeepers get new names... not exactly the future I'm looking for.

Faraday Future Is The Mysterious Car Company Taking On Tesla, by Harry Tucker, News.com.au

The basis to the theory obviously begins around the fact that it’s almost certain that Apple will be entering the car market over the next five years. Apple has never been one to reveal its plans so far away from release and hiding a massive manufacturing plant would be even harder.

This would also explain the lack of known CEO, as pushing an Apple executive to that position would immediately give it away, and it would be highly unlikely Apple would put someone that hasn’t spent time there in that role. Let’s not also forget that Faraday seemed to have plucked its funding in an extremely short time.

End Of Deck

Here is a new poem about someone who is sick of corporate PowerPoint presentations and stock photography. pic.twitter.com/7Z19FP1ciO

— Brian Bilston (@brian_bilston) November 6, 2015

~

Thanks for reading.