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When Apple announced that it was bringing lossless music and Spatial Audio to Apple Music, it majored on the latter and mentioned lossless almost in passing. That struck me at the time as the wrong way around, but listening to Spatial Audio tracks has changed my mind. Spatial Audio – aka Dolby Atmos – had obvious appeal for movies, but with the possible exception of recordings of live performances, I couldn’t see much point in it for music …...

Bloomberg last week reported that Apple is planning to launch an LTE version of the Apple Watch last year. John Gruber then suggested that a new form factor was also in the works – though he later added a sentence somewhat walking back the idea. But assuming there is actually a new form factor on the way, the natural assumption would be that it would be that we’re discussing the same model....

A wristband that zaps you with a 255-volt electric shock if you over-spend is the latest idea from Intelligent Environments, a company that first announced the Pavlock wearable 18 months ago as a way to dissuade owners from visiting time-wasting websites. The band would be triggered, explains the BBC, if your bank balance drops too quickly. Unsurprisingly, no bank has yet signed up for the service. But while the idea may be silly, it seems to me that the underlying concept here is exactly where the Internet of Things should be headed …...

It is commonly said that Life always remains in motion. Nothing around us stops for a while and in order to keep up the pace with the change that is taking place, we have to learn a lot of new things. By learning them, we simply make sure that we are familiar with the algorithms of the motion that are necessary to live a wonderful life. With each day, learning something new is exactly what most people enjoy while others think it’s a daunting task....

10% off is not a Black Friday sale, it’s a rounding error. So here are a few businesses that delivered on the promise of the biggest online shopping day of the year; we’ll be keeping a close eye on them in 2019! Cards Against Humanity The card game company knows how to use satire to promote itself. They’ve rebranded to a (legitimate) chip company and their 2015 Black Friday promotion involved asking everyone to give them $5 for no reason…and they raised $71k, which they then spent on themselves....

The creators of the Conjuring franchise, Chad and Carey Hayes, have announced their next project: a planned franchise based on famous haunted mansions including LaLaurie Mansion in New Orleans. They will team up with the newly established company Faster Horse Pictures, which was established by Cindy Bond and Doug McKay earlier this year. The Hayes brothers are responsible for bringing the massively successful Conjuring franchise to life when they wrote the screenplay for the first film....

Apple’s SVP of software engineering, Craig Federighi, sat down with MacStories’ Federico Viticci at WWDC to take a deep dive into the new developer tools announced this week including Catalyst (formerly Marzipan), SwiftUI and its purpose, why it was the right time to introduce iPadOS, and much more. The 45-minute conversation covers a range of in-depth aspects about Catalyst, SwiftUI, iPadOS, updates to the Shortcuts app, and more. When discussing Catalyst – Apple’s tool to bring iPad apps to Mac – Federighi noted that it should create a lot of value and accessibility for developers who haven’t been able to keep employees on staff that are experts in AppKit....

As detailed earlier this afternoon, Craig Federighi is currently testifying during the Apple vs. Epic lawsuit. While facing questioning from Apple’s lawyers, Federighi made some interesting comments about security, particularly noting that the Mac currently has a level of malware that Apple “does not find acceptable.” One of Federighi’s goals is to paint the iPhone ecosystem, including the App Store and lack of side-loading support, as a secure and trusted environment for users....

Therefore, every company must move security to the top of the priority list in order to be secure against the latest sophisticated attacks. Additionally, there are many cases where common techniques are used by hackers in order to infiltrate into the company’s network – for example, malicious Word and Excel documents containing PowerShell code, which once enabled, will execute on the victim’s machine. Due to the vast number of security defense techniques and a many thread detection techniques, attackers have started concentrating on the weakest link in a chain, which is a human user....

Apple yesterday shared details of how face recognition works on the iPhone X, but one thing that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves is how Apple future-proofed its iOS authentication from the start. This future-proofing is why all Touch ID enabled apps will automatically authenticate with Face ID without requiring developers to update … When a developer wants an app user to authenticate, they don’t get involved in the nitty-gritty of how that authentication is performed....

In the modern world, old trends are widely circulating and attracting the attention of many people. One of the biggest reason believed for the fame of old things and concepts is they make many people remind their past. Thus, they emotionally attract many people and technology giants in the current scenario are also seems to be familiar with this. The same is believed to be one of the leading reason Samsung has launched a flip smartphone in 2020....

With respect to the rise in the overall number of smartphone users across the globe, more and more manufacturers are becoming common and popular. It is very much true that in the present time there are more manufacturers than ever before. Although, users can have many advantages such as low price due to competition, there are several disadvantages as well. You might have no idea but the fact is this sometimes makes selecting a phone a very daunting task....

One of the main draws of AirPods has always been their ability to essentially be invisible, both to the user and to people around them. When they were first introduced they had two features, the ability to play music and the ability to talk to Siri with a tap. But over the past five years, Apple has added new features both through hardware revisions and in software updates that have us wondering if AirPods deserve their own companion app on iPhone....

With many cities, states, and countries asking people to remain at home, Google and Facebook location data is being used to help determine how many people are complying with the coronavirus lockdown… Our sister site 9to5Google reports that Google is aggregating location data for 131 countries, measuring the drop-in visits to places like retail stores and transit stations. Reuters reports that Facebook is doing a similar analysis in the US, including a guide to how many people are staying at home....

There’s an old maxim that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, meaning that anything which appears to be free will have a hidden cost somewhere. In the tech sector, ‘free’ services generally operate using one of two different business models. The first is ad-funded, where – as the more recently-coined saying has it – you’re the product, not the customer. Some cheat the system by using ad-blockers, but most of us recognize that someone has to pay the bills, and accept exposure to ads as fair exchange for the benefit we receive....

Apple caused a furore yesterday when it admitted that it deliberately slows down older iPhones. The issue first came to the fore with a Reddit thread, which showed a significant difference in performance on the same device when fitted with old and new batteries. Geekbench founder, John Poole, confirmed the phenomenon, and developer Guilherme Rambo subsequently identified the code that controlled it. Apple then confirmed the facts, and explained its reasons …...

The Style is exactly what that is widely focused by a lot of users in the present scenario when it comes to buying a smartphone. Of course, features matters, but the fact couldn’t be denied that the style, appearance, look, as well as elegance also play equal role in the success of a smartphone. Well, if you too pay equal attention to appearance along with features, Blu Vivo X is the smartphone launched for you....

Budget smartphones are demanded all over the world. Xiaomi is one of the first brands that realized the need of smartphones with high features and low price tags. Although their smartphones were first limited to China, presently there is hardly any user who is not familiar with them. In fact, Xiaomi has imposed a huge challenge for Samsung and Apple across the globe and has given key competition to some other well-established smartphones....

Community had many characters that were easy to love. One of these people, of course, was Shirley Bennett (Yvette Nicole Brown), who was a mother of three and a former Greendale student. She went on to earn a business degree and opened a successful sandwich shop on campus with Pierce Hawthorne (Chevy Chase). Shirley was known to be the nicest member of the study group, always watching over her friends’ well-being....

Last week a jury determined that Samsung violated several of Apple’s smartphone patents, a ruling which resulted in Samsung being faced with hefty fees for damages and lost revenue to Apple. Following the decision, Samsung then filed an emergency motion with the court to stop the payments while the United States Patent and Trademark Office re-evaluates the validity of Apple’s key patent. Specifically, the Patent Office has issued an advisory that declares the patent on Apple’s “pinch to zoom” gesture invalid....