Since 2015 Above Avalon has published a list of questions for Apple, across hardware, software, services, and «big picture.» Here are the questions for Apple in 2019.
January is a great time to embrace the unknown rather than come up with Apple predictions for the next 12 months. Accordingly, this is my fifth installment of Apple questions as a new year kicks off.
It’s a big, detailed list and lays out things we wonder and things rumors have suggested.
Facebook will introduce stricter rules on political advertising to a number of countries holding elections this year. The rules and tools aimed at curbing election interference will go live in India, Nigeria, Ukraine, and the European Union. The rollout will begin on Wednesday in Nigeria. Katie Harbath, Facebook’s Director of Global Politics and Outreach, told Reuters that only advertisers located in the country will be able to run electoral adverts there. Rob Leathern, a Director of Product Management at Facebook, also discussed the importance of storing electoral adverts in a searchable library.
We’re learning from every country,” Leathern said. “We know we’re not going to be perfect, but our goal is continuing, ongoing improvement.” Facebook believes that holding the ads in a library for seven years is a key part of fighting intereference, he added.. The library will resemble archives brought to the United States, Brazil and Britain last year.
Kelly Guimont has Bryan Chaffin and Andrew Orr on to discuss the state of IBM PC packaging and how to interpret Apple Watch heart rate data.
We have a deal on PDF Converter OCR 6 for Mac. This software allows you to make PDFs editable and searchable, while retaining the original layout, graphics, and hyperlinks. You can also scan 27 languages, merge multiple documents, and more. You can get this app for $19 through our deal.
Redditor u/keveridge put together a nice guide on how to use JavaScript when creating Shortcuts. JavaScript lets you perform complex actions that would be hard to do with regular shortcut actions.
We make use of the Safari web browser, running within the shortcut, in order to execute the JavaScript. To do so, we:
make an HTML file that contains our code and provides an output;
pass the contents of the file to Safari as a Data URL;
use Get Contents of Web Page to render the page provide the output to the shortcut.
It seems that Adobe is raising the price of its subscription in specific countries, although U.S. users have been spared. Lifehacker compiled a list of 27 Adobe alternatives in response.
I haven’t tried out all of these apps myself, nor am I the target audience for them—as I don’t really dabble in 3D animation, alas. While we normally recommend apps we’ve used at Lifehacker, in this case, I’ve included recommendations from the various Twitter users who have suggested them when applicable.
On my iPad I quickly bought Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, and both of them work great for my workflow.
Doing the opposite of most major internet companies, Roku decided for a couple of hours it would allow Alex Jones on its platform.
“After the InfoWars channel became available, we heard from concerned parties and have determined that the channel should be removed from our platform. Deletion from the channel store and platform has begun and will be completed shortly.”
If Roku was going to cave so quickly it shouldn’t have decided to let Alex Jones on in the first place. At least pretend to put up a fight for a couple more days.
Apple’s growing services business, and its increasing openness to having its software on other people’s hardware, is one of the most fascinating stories in tech at the moment. Tech blogger turned venture capitalist M.G. Siegler has written an excellent summary of the situation on Medium. As he says, the future for the company «is going to be… different.»
Incidentally, it was a pod that really started to change the equation. The iPod. In order to reach a wider audience with that device, Apple had to do something that was seemingly against Steve Jobs’ DNA: make software for Windows. (Ice water! In Hell!) And the slope ultimately proved slippery, albeit in a slow way. Eventually, we got (and then lost) Safari for Windows. And in the more recent era, Apple Music for Android. And Alexa.
Beth Skwarecki wrote a helpful article explaining how to understand Apple Watch heart rate data and what all the numbers mean.
Some major caveats on everything we’re about to say: first, everybody is different, so if your numbers are higher or lower than you’d expect, there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with you. There’s a wide range of normal.
Check out today’s deal for the Insta360 ONE 4K Action Camera, a 360 degree camera for your iPhone or iPad. It plugs into your Lightning port, though it can also be controlled via Bluetooth for Android, if that’s your thing. It boosts a 24 megapixel camera, and it supports video up to 4K. The promo video below has a good look at the device, and our deal listing has all the specs and details. It’s $239.99 through us.
