In celebration of Force Friday II, Apple this week will host a number of Star Wars-themed Today at Apple events at retail stores across the world, including special computer graphics tutorials featuring Industrial Light and Magic artists.
Announced through the Today at Apple website, Apple's Force Friday II sessions include workshops on iPad video creation, drone programming for kids, CG art and more.
Until now, Apple hasn’t put much effort behind Apple TV gaming—an echo of the company’s seeming attitude toward gaming in general—and Cue’s comments from December 2015 suggest this was intentional. While the hands-off approach might have worked for the iPhone and iPad, it’s not having the same effect for Apple’s living room box. Until gaming becomes more than an afterthought for Apple, it’ll remain an afterthought for its customers, and a source of apathy for its developers.
The current laptop line forces users to pay for the Touch Bar on the higher end devices whether they want it or not, and that’s a cost users shouldn’t need to pay for a niche technology without a future. So Apple needs to either roll the Touch Bar out to the entire line and convince us we want it, or roll it back and offer more laptop options without it. [...]
Right now, my bet is on Apple having decided they fell in love with the Touch Bar and lost sight of the fact that Apple sells solutions to problems, not technologies.
Of the services that do still offer unlimited storage, Backblaze has consistently taken second place to CrashPlan. Backblaze is unusually open about the way the company provisions its storage; it regularly publishes data about the reliability of the hard disks themselves, and also publishes the designs for its high density storage servers.
Perhaps more significantly, the company has consistently maintained to us that its consumer backup service is profitable. While this provides no guarantees that a later pivot might take it out of the market, this probably represents the best safeguard that Backblaze will continue to provide consumer cloud backup services indefinitely.
Lightricks’ Enlight Photofox is a major update to the Enlight iOS app, a Photoshop-style mobile photo shooting and editing app that delivers a vast variety of corrections and special effects tools and workflows.
Photofox includes sophisticated painterly and collage capabilities designed to transform your images into works of art. Technically, Photofox is an update of the original Enlight app, but it looks and feels more like a related standalone app targeting a pro level audience. It’s similar to its predecessor and is available alongside it on the App Store.
The release introduces the new Quick Index feature, which shortens the index creation process by 50 percent thanks to a more efficient search of headings and bold-face text that enables the index to be built as you work dynamically. It also brings the new Story feature, enabling you to add story points to a manuscript and use them to navigate through the document to attach characters and locations.
CCC 5.0 is able to create bootable system backups from APFS to APFS, HFS to APFS, and APFS to HFS (as well as HFS to HFS), while also supporting APFS encryption for both source and destination and for remote Mac source and destination volumes.
Designed especially for technical draftsmen and designers, it packs extensive pen options and the ability to export the visible drawing as DXF.
“As physicians, we always want to know how our patients with MS are doing on the treatments we prescribe,” Stanley Cohan, MD, PhD, medical director of Providence Multiple Sclerosis Center, Portland, Oregon, said in a statement. “With the elevateMS app, study participants can frequently document their symptoms in a personal health story.”
When it comes to downloading a new app, it would appear that the majority of us are old dogs. That is to say, we simply can’t be taught new tricks … or at least be convinced to download new apps. According to comScore’s new 2017 U.S. Mobile Apps Reports, more than half of American smartphone users download exactly zero new apps a month. That’s right, friends: 51 percent of us are keeping our iPhone and Android home screens looking exactly the same month after month after month.
Many years ago, I used to launch the App Store app just to see what are some of the new apps Apple is recommending. I haven't done that for a long time.
Maybe the new App Store in iOS 11 will change that. I'll definitely check out the new design when iOS 11 is launched. (I'm not using the beta.)
~
Thanks for reading.