The New York Times is building an app for audio journalism and it’s inviting beta testers to try it out.
“New York Times Audio” will provide an accessible and authoritative way to understand the world, pulling from Times podcasts, Times articles, premier magazine publishers like New York magazine and Rolling Stone, new audio formats from The Times newsroom and more. The product will also feature the archive of “This American Life,” encompassing 25 years worth of episodes from the iconic show that pioneered a new form of audio narrative journalism.
The ‘Unleashed’Apple Event will take place on Monday, October 18, 2021. As has been the case in recent months, the announcement comes accompanied with an AR Easter Egg. This one has sound and the ability to add the relevant details directly to your calendar.
Federico Viticci’s Apple Frames shortcut is an invaluable tool and one that I use nearly every day. All of the iPhone and iPad screenshots in my articles are framed using this shortcut. On Tuesday, Mr. Viticci announced Apple Frames 2.0, and it completely changes the way the tool works. “When I started working on this new version of Apple Frames, I realized I needed to fix something that had been bugging me for a while: if you tried to open the shortcut editor for Apple Frames, it was incredibly slow to scroll, which made it too difficult for most users to edit and inspect actions contained in the shortcut.”
Apple TV+ released a new trailer for The Shrink Next Door on Tuesday. The eight-part comedy series stars Paul Rudd and Will Ferrell, telling the story of a therapist who crosses every line. It will premiere on November 12.
Smile, the developer of the TextExpander productivity app, has announced TextExpander 7.0. The latest update significantly enhances the user experience, improving performance and broadening accessibility within the app. TextExpander 7.0 wraps these changes in a whole new, streamlined look and feel. A fresh and refined user interface includes a more unified user experience, updates to snippet suggestions, as well as enhanced responsiveness and functionality. Updated conflict management helps users ensure the right snippets expand when needed. TextExpander users will notice the upgraded search feature, which helps them to find the right snippets faster. In addition to improved functionality, the latest update makes TextExpander more accessible to all. Beyond improvements to appearance settings and keyboard navigation, the latest version revises the app layout and improves the design for screen reader compatibility.
A research team at Applepublished a study in October examining supervised and self-supervised algorithms. The title is “Do Self-Supervised and Supervised Methods Learn Similar Visual Representations?” From the abstract:
We find that the methods learn similar intermediate representations through dissimilar means, and that the representations diverge rapidly in the final few layers. We investigate this divergence, finding that it is caused by these layers strongly fitting to the distinct learning objectives. We also find that SimCLR’s objective implicitly fits the supervised objective in intermediate layers, but that the reverse is not true.
Host Charlotte Henry is joined by Jeff Gamet and Tom Merrit for a special episode. They look back on season two of Ted Lasso and wonder where the show might go next.
The Apple Watch Series 7 became available to order on Friday. In the latest edition of his ‘Power On’ newsletter, Bloomberg News‘s Mark Gurman noted how the wearable has got closer to breaking free from the iPhone but isn’t there yet.
Seven years into the Apple Watch era, one of Apple’s most promising device categories still does things the old way. As any Apple Watch owner knows, an iPhone is required for activation and setup, syncing data and day-to-day operating. The Apple Watch doesn’t meet the Jobs vision for every Apple device being able to operate and exist on its own. Apple has taken some steps over the years to push the Apple Watch in that direction, though… Despite those enhancements, you still can’t buy an Apple Watch, set it up from the device itself, and move over all of your content from the cloud. That limits the potential user base of the Apple Watch—and excludes people who might want to only own an Apple Watch and a Mac or iPad and no iPhone. Or, one day, people who want an Apple Watch as their only device.
There’s a lot going on in season two of See on Apple TV+. Underneath it all are rivalries, hatred, and vendettas between a range of characters. A new featurette looks to unpack it all.
Ever wonder why the chance of rain is forecast as 100%, but you don’t see a drop? Well, it all comes down to what that number really means. Jeff Butts explains what meteorologists are really saying in your local forecast.
