Charlotte Henry

There has been a lot of talk about how contact tracing apps could help keep people safe from COVID-19 as countries try to move out of lockdown. There’s a really useful piece on Bloomberg News outlining the issues between various proposed models, including that being developed by Apple and Google.

Apple and Google even renamed their framework Exposure Notification, signaling that it doesn’t do true contact tracing, the process of tracking a virus from person to person. Instead, it lets individual smartphones keep track of which other handsets they’ve come close to by using Bluetooth wireless signals. If a person notifies the network they have tested positive for Covid-19, everyone they could have infected is issued a warning, if they’ve opted in. The system does this matching anonymously on each device, rather than in a central database that governments could use to track the disease more broadly — a feature the companies say is more secure and helps quell user concerns about who sees their sensitive health data.

Zoom has become, it is fair to say, synonymous with video conferencing in this work from home era. Wired looked at how it beat Skype to become so dominant.

Not that people are using either as much as Zoom, which benefited both from being free to download and more reliable than its competitors. (Eric Yuan, Zoom’s founder, has been working on web conferencing software since he arrived in the US in 1997 from China to work for WebEx). An April 2020 survey of 1,110 US companies by Creative Strategies showed that 27 per cent of businesses primarily used Zoom for video calls and meetings, compared to 18 per cent that used Teams, and 15 per cent that used Skype. Many companies had quietly moved over from Skype to Zoom in the intervening years as Skype added more and more features that didn’t fit the core functionality of the service: producing decent quality video calls. And so when coronavirus hit, what in the first half of 2017 would have been a call to download Skype to keep in touch instead became a demand to download Zoom.

American Idol is the latest show to be filmed using iPhones. A kit including three iPhone 11 Pros is being sent to each of the judges, Techcrunch reported.

Apple’s among those tech companies working with production houses, getting some iPhone-powered rigs into the hands of producers and hosts. The list includes a Parks and Recreation reunion, Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Fallon’s late night shows and now longstanding prime-time talent contest, American Idol. The ABC show’s producers are sending home studio rigs to each of the contestants and judges to shoot the final few episodes of the season. It’s a three-camera setup, including three iPhone 11 Pros, a tripod and a ring light. The production team is helping out with camera setup and editing at a safe distance, from home.

A filmed version of Hamilton will be available on Disney+ from July 3, Deadline reported. It had previously been slated to go into cinemas in October next year.

Disney has just changed its plans to release a filmed version of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical Hamilton. It will now be released July 3 on Disney+, accelerating an original October 15, 2021 theatrical release, followed by a Disney+ berth. Disney Executive Chairman Robert Iger and Lin-Manuel Miranda just announced on Good Morning America that Hamilton will brighten up the July 4 weekend with the seminal hip hop American history tale.

Could the Apple Watch work with Android devices? Should it? As Rene Ritchie noted at iMore, it’s not something Steve Jobs wanted, but current Apple execs have explored the possibility.

Right now, the Apple Watch adds to the value of the iPhone, but in a different way. I mean, the iPhone makes almost all the profit in mobile already. Almost all profits everywhere. As markets mature, like the iPhone market has — like the phone market in general has — though, and you don’t have more customers buying, you add accessories and services so customers buy more. Apple spent a decade building up the iPhone so that they could spend the next decade using the iPhone as a platform to build up everything else, from Apple Watch to AirPods to Apple Music to TV+. But the question remains, would Apple Watch make even more money for Apple if it wasn’t dependent on the iPhone? If, like AirPods and Apple Music, and even TV+ to some extent, it could also work with everything, or just many things else? Like Android. And iPad.

Apple has been on a big hiring spree – trying to get some of the best cloud talent and open-source engineers in the industry into the company. Protocol had a look at what it all might mean.

It’s not entirely clear what Apple has in mind, but numerous job postings indicate that the company is in the midst of building new tools for its internal software development teams. Apple declined to comment on its plans for the new hires. Apple runs a massive web operation, including the iCloud file storage service, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+ and its own ecommerce site. However, it has for years been considered a bit of a backwater in the tech infrastructure community, far behind companies like AWS, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Netflix.

By any standards, the AirPods have been a staggering success. Wired has a great piece on how it happened.

AirPods were initially positioned modestly as an iPhone 7 and 7 Plus accessory, one that solved the thorny issue of dropping the headphone jack from the iPhone. The most recent iteration – 2019’s AirPods Pro, which boasts a considerably improved design and, crucially, active noise-cancelling – was not announced on stage at all. “It was almost like wildfire how quickly it spread,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of product marketing, says. “It’s done even better than we could ever imagine.” Estimates suggest that in 2019 Apple sold 35 million pairs of AirPods. Though Apple never shares its figures of individual product sales, in the company’s most recent earnings call for the first quarter of 2020, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated that the “demand for AirPods continues to be phenomenal”. There are a number of reasons for the popularity. Unusually for the Cupertino company, Apple came in with an aggressive price point for each version of the AirPods. Once it added key features such as noise-cancelling and wireless charging, the Pros became a yardstick in the wireless earphone category.

Users who like dark mode regularly complain that their favorite iOS app does not support it. On Cult of Mac, indie developer Graham Bower explains why it takes time.

The problem is that while some parts of your user interface — like the background — automatically switch to dark, others do not. Some text becomes unreadable because it’s black-on-black. Headers with white backgrounds look too bright and annoying. Illustrations and icons designed for a light background look terrible. Yes, if the app had been built using Apple’s default buttons and styles, maybe it wouldn’t have looked so bad. But in reality, life is never that simple. Even Apple’s built-in apps often deviate from the default user interface elements these days.

The 15 Apple Stores in Germany are going to reopen their doors on May 11 following the coronavirus-enforced closure, reported 9to5 Mac. As with other places that have reopened, customers to the retail outlets will have to adhere to some health and safety rules.

Germany hasn’t mitigated coronavirus infections to the extent of other regions where Apple Stores have reopened, but the country has seen a steady decline in daily new cases for over a month. The flattened curve was enough for Chancellor Angela Merkel to begin easing Germany’s national lockdown and allowing larger retail stores to resume business. Apple Stores in Germany will adhere to familiar health and safety precautions for the foreseeable future.