If you want a consumer-friendly video editor on your Mac, iPhone and iPad, but iMovie isn’t your thing, Adobe has a new app for you to check out: Premiere Rush CC. The app launched at Adobe MAX on Monday. It includes the video editing tools you need to record and edit, adjust or add audio, and share your movies on social networks. It uses Adobe Creative Cloud to sync files so you can switch devices while editing, too. I’ve been using the beta and it’s pretty impressive. You can try Premiere Rush CC for free. It’s priced at US$9.99 a month for individuals, $19.99 a month for teams, and $29.99 a month for enterprise.
Steve Troughton-Smith does more than post Apple product leaks. He’s also a professional coder, and his latest pet project shows why it would be cool to get third-party faces for Apple Watch. He’s come up with some pretty interesting watch faces, plus he posted the example code on Github so you can experiment with your own—assuming you’re a developer. I get Apple not wanting horribly garish watch faces, but maybe they could partner with some developers or make a watch face screening process. I know I’m ready for some options outside of Apple’s limited pool.
Apple purchased the music and artist discovery service Asaii—a deal that was confirmed by the company’s investment backer The House. Asaii makes tools for finding and managing artists, along with a tool for music services to make recommendations to listeners. The House founder Cameron Baradar told Music Ally,
As the first investors in Asaii, we are incredibly excited by their recent acquisition by Apple where they will have the opportunity to dramatically scale their impact and continue building out their vision for the future of the music industry.
Asaii’s founders are now part of the Apple Music team. Their tools can predict the next music hits weeks in advance. Couple that with the music discovery tools and Apple Music’s listening recommendations could get a lot better very soon.
APFS has been available on our Macs for a year now, and we’re beginning to see the issues with corruption that can’t be yet be solved by Apple or third party utilities. Wi-Fi is changing names… and getting faster! And folks, Backups are still important! All this and more in this week’s Mac Geek Gab. Press play and enjoy!
Bryan Chaffin explains how Bitcoin faucets work and which faucets you can trust to pay. [Update: Added a paying faucet and tested all faucets. – Bryan]
Robot technology often invokes sophisticated mechanisms, in order to perform a task, that mimic those of living creatures. When done right, the visual effect can be startling, even creepy. Mark Serrels writes: “Meet “Salto-1P” a robot being designed by the Biomimetic Millisystems lab at Berkeley, University of California. The work is being supported by an Army Research Office Grant, which makes me wonder if one of these things is gonna kill me one day.” Better check under your bed again, Mark.
Modern technology, like AI, can look dorky and error prone in its early stages. We make fun of it. Then it matures before our eyes. Chatted with a lightbulb lately?
Apple has a new trailer out for Carpool Karaoke promoting an upcoming episode with Jamie Foxx and his daughter Corinne Foxx. The trailer feature’s Foreigner’s ripoff of Deep Purple’s “My Woman from Tokyo” “Hot Blooded.” The theme of this episode is father-daughter clashes over what gets played on the car’s radio, which will surely resonate with lots of folks. Jamie Foxx is a great singer, too. Here’s the trailer.
We have a deal on the Meross Smart Wi-Fi Power Strip. This device not only has three standard plugs and two USB ports, it has Wi-Fi connectivity that allows you to control each plug individually through the Meross app. You can turn connected devices on and off, set schedules, and activate timer routines, protecting your devices and trimming down your power usage. It’s $23.99 through our deal.
I’ve been a fan of Dark Mode ever since Adobe added it to Photoshop CS6 back in 2012. That’s why I was so excited to see system-wide Dark Mode support in macOS Mojave, and yet Apple managed to make me dislike the feature so much I gave up on it. For now, I’ll be sticking with the pre-Mojave light colored windows and menus instead. I planned on using Dark Mode to cut the brightness out of Finder windows, but now I’m going back to what I did before: When I’m writing and my screen feels too bright I switch to Grayscale mode. Andrew Orr did a great job of explaining how to turn it on and off for your Mac as well as iPhone and iPad. Check out his tip.
Big Data is a huge money making business, and a big example of this is AOL. No longer an ISP, AOL is now a data broker.
The collected data has value because of how it’s used in online advertising, specifically targeted advertising: when a company sends an ad your way based on information about you, such as your location, age, and race. Targeted ads, the thinking goes, are not only more likely to result in a sale (or at least a click), they’re also supposed to be more relevant to consumers.
While some people might want better ads that are more relevant to them, the article makes a good point: “I have targeted ads that are more attuned to my desires and my wants… But if you have someone who has an alcohol abuse problem getting a liquor store ad…”
And I’m cynical enough to believe that the average advertiser wouldn’t care about that in the slightest.
Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo take advantage of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia deservers way more of our money.
But it’s not just the fact that this donation is, in the scheme of things, paltry. It’s that this “endowment” is dwarfed by what Amazon and its ilk get out of Wikipedia—figuratively and literally. Wikipedia provides the intelligence behind many of Alexa’s most useful skills, its answers to everything from “What is Wikipedia?” to “What is Slate?” (meta). Tech companies that profit from Wikipedia’s extensive database owe Wikimedia a much greater debt.
Amazon recently donated US$1 million to Wikimedia, but that’s a drop in the bucket when you think just how many people and services use Wikipedia. Especially since it’s a non-profit organization that gets most of its money through donations.
Dave Hamilton and Andrew Orr join Jeff Gamet to look at what’s new in the WiFi Mesh market, plus they share their thoughts on whether or not Apple will host an iPad Pro media event in October.
Privacy search engine DuckDuckGo announced it has reached 30 million daily searches. This is good news, because unlike other search engines DuckDuckGo doesn’t track you.
We’ve been growing by approximately 50% a year pretty consistently so at a macro level it isn’t too surprising, just the numbers are getting bigger! That said it has been even increased on top of that this year, especially in the past two months.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo exclusively for a couple years now, and its gotten much better in that time. I don’t miss Google at all.
Kanye West climbed on top of a product display table in the Georgetown Apple store on Thursday so he could deliver a “keynote” to shoppers. Apple didn’t invite him into the store to speak or climb on furniture, although he was apparently quite the spectacle. I said it before, and now I’m putting the call out again: Can someone get this man some help?
