Good news for folks in the market for a 4K computer monitor. Prices are really starting to come down on Ultra HD displays, and 4K video games and content are becoming more and more common.
There are several to choose from, but as usual, we're here to help you sort through the noise. In our latest accessory roundup, we take a look at the best 4K monitors for your laptop or desktop computer.
Instagram for iOS is pretty decent, but there are times when you just wanna quickly post an image without having the app unnecessarily eat into that precious cellular data by refreshing feeds and other content. While you can send photos from other iPhone apps via Instagram's Share sheet extension, it's now possible to upload images through Safari as well.
This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions explaining how to upload your photographs to Instagram using the mobile web interface, no apps needed whatsoever.
Before we get to it, know that you cannot take or upload photos from Instagram's web interface on a desktop computer. Only Instagram's web UI on mobile lets you do that.
Apple is expected to change iPhone's screen aspect ratio from 16:9 on iPhone 7 to 18:9 on iPhone 8, according to multiple reports. Economic Daily News said today that the device's screen ratio will change to 18.5:9 instead of the previous 16:9.
18.5:9 accounts for the rumored curvature of iPhone 8's OLED display: the phone's active display area is understood to be 5.1 or 5.2 inches in the precise 18:9 aspect ratio.
Yesterday, DigiTimes said that Apple is expected to unveil a new iPhone in the second half of 2017, equipped with a 5.8-inch AMOLED panel in the—you guessed right—18:9 aspect ratio.
Aspect ratio is the relationship between the height and width of a display. In simpler terms, a 16:9 screen has 16 pixels in one direction for every 9 pixels in the other. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, popularized by older TVs, and 16:9 found on widescreen ones.
18:9 has been popularized by the latest phones from Samsung and LG, which have screens that are taller than the 16:9 ratio used by the majority of smartphones.
Already, these new phones have prompted panel vendors to expand capacity to meet fast-growing demand for 18:9 smartphone displays.
It looks like the 18:9 screen aspect ratio is here to stay, but what's so special about it?
Mockup of iPhone 8 with Full Vision Display, via iFanr.
For starters, the 18:9 screen aspect ratio (you could just call it a 2:1 display) results in a display that's a little bit taller than a typical 16:9 screen. As a result, an 18:9 phone may provide a better grip than its 16:9 counterpart.
As a bonus, 18:9 is perfectly suited for Split View multitasking that Apple is expected to bring to iPhone with iOS 11. More importantly, on an 18:9 screen you can have one app on top of another in portrait mode. In the Camera app, as an example, you might be able to take a square photo on half of the screen and review it on the other half.
18:9 screens also show more content vertically so users see more of a webpage in Safari, additional images in their Instagram feed, more tweets and so forth, without scrolling.
On the downside, a majority of HD videos today are encoded in the 16:9 format and many games and apps are optimized for 16:9 on a landscape mode. If iPhone 8 will really come outfitted with an 18:9 display, all 16:9 videos will show blank space on the sides of the phone.
As Ron Amadeo of Ars Technica noted in his review of Galaxy S8, the device's unusual aspect ratio results in pillarboxing when watching 16:9 video without zooming or stretching it.
What's the point of having thin bezels on a phone if your 16:9 movie-watching experience suffers from blank space on the sides, you might be asking. While this is no doubt concerning, you can always double-tap to prompt iOS's media player to zoom in the video so that it fills the entire screen, in which case parts of the video would get cropped out.
Still, 18:9 could gain momentum if filmmakers adopt it.
iPhone 8 concept courtesy of designer Gábor Balogh.
For what it's worth, select new shows on Amazon Video and Netflix are shot in 18:9. Plus, Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro is pushing the new Univisum 2:1 format (or 18:9) versus the typically wider 2.20:1 aspect ratio commonly used in movie theaters nowadays.
It's unclear, and this is important, if iPhone 8's upgraded camera will feature a new aspect ratio that's closer to 18:9. Take Galaxy S8's 12-megapixel camera which shoots in 4:3 by default. But start shooting in the 18.5:9 mode and you only get 7.9-megapixel of its capabilities.
In the same vein, LG G6's thirteen-megapixel camera offers a maximum of 8.7-megapixel capability in 18.5:9 mode, or 9.7 megapixels for 16:9 images. Only 4:3 images can be shot in the full 13-megapixel resolution.
On the other hand, as iPhone 8 is said to include an active screen area at the display's bottom potentially designed for showing persistent on-screen controls, like Android, it's entirely conceivably that the actual content area could be in the 16:9 aspect ratio.
Apps are likely going to need to be updated to take the full advantage of the 18:9 canvas, but having been there before we expect a relatively painless transition. Be that as it may, Apple certainly is no stranger to making an iPhone's screen taller.
Claimed iPhone 8 case (middle) next to iPhone 7 (left) and iPhone 7 Plus case (right).
With 2012's iPhone 5, Apple made the display a tad taller without making it wider so that users could still reach corners at the top in one-handed mode. It took developers several months to update their apps to take full advantage of the new screen format. It follows that existing apps on an 18:9 iPhone would show black bars on the top and bottom of the screen.
At any rate, Google has urged developers to work with newer 18:9 aspect ratios for their apps and Apple is expected to do the same if iPhone 8 adopts the new screen format.
In other words, expect 18:9 to quickly become the new norm for smartphones.
As we reported before, iPhone 8 should manage to squeeze a 5.8-inch AMOLED panel (with an active display area measuring 5.1 inches) inside a chassis that would be just a little bit wider and a tad taller than the existing 4.7-inch iPhones.
Hopefully, Apple will achieve this by drastically reducing or eliminating the bezels and integrating the Home button, Touch ID, the camera and sensors into the display assembly.
Fun fact: the original iPhone had a screen aspect ratio of 3:2.
iPhone 8 mockup top of post via Benjamin Geskin.
Gatwick Airport, the UK’s second busiest airport after London Heathrow, has installed 2,000 battery-powered iBeacons for indoor navigation and passenger tracking.
Available across Gatwick Airport’s two terminals, the system is accurate up to three meters, much more reliable than GPS and enables an augmented-reality wayfinding tool so passengers can be shown directions in the camera view of their mobile device.
It could be used to inform passengers they’re running late and help them avoid missing flights.
Conceivably, Gatwick Airport could also take advantage of iBeacons for efficient queue management and to reduce congestion by being able to determine whether to offload luggage if a late passenger is far away.
According to the airport, they won't be collecting any personal data from the beacons with the exception of “generic information on ‘people densities’ in different beacon zones.”
Deployed in just three weeks, iBeacons form part of Gatwick’s £2.5 billion (about $3.1 billion) transformation initiative. The technology is currently being integrated into some of the Gatwick apps.
The airport is in discussion with other airlines to enable the indoor positioning and wayfinding tools to also feature on their apps and services.
According to Gatwick:
Airlines could go further—and with the consent of their passengers—may send reminders on their airline app to late running passengers, for example, or find out where they are and make an informed decision on whether to wait or offload their luggage so the aircraft can take off on time.
The lack of satellite signals makes road-based navigation systems, like Apple Maps, unreliable indoors. That's why Apple has developed inexpensive iBeacons, which are tiny battery-powered Bluetooth transmitters.
At its annual developers conference earlier in the month, Google announced three new features for its Photos app: automatically curated albums, photo books and sharing suggestions.
Today, the company pushed an update to its Photos app for iOS, Android and the web, bringing support for ordering printed photo books comprised of your best photographs. You can make a photo book in minutes with automatic photo curation and easy customization.
Photo booksTo order a printed photo book, select the images you’d like to fill your album with. Google’s machine learning picks the best shots for your, removing duplicates and poor quality images.
In fact, the app will even offer personalized suggestions for photo books, like your trip to the Grand Canyon, time with family during the holidays, your puppy and so forth.
You can order a seven-inch square softcover book for $10 a piece or its nine-inch hardcover version for twice as much. Each has twenty pages though you can buy additional pages if you'd like:
Softcover—$0.35 per additional page Hardcover—$0.65 per additional pagePhoto books are currently available to users in the US only.
However, the search company has made promises to bring them to more countries soon.
Google photo books key highlights:
Quickly find your best shots— Start from an album or search for a person, place or thing. Then, Google Photos can automatically pick out your best photos—helping you save time. Perfect your book in minutes—Easily move around your photos, add a book title and tweak your cover design. Beautifully crafted for you—Just choose a size and get started on your phone or computer. Photo books are made in the USA from premium, responsibly sourced materials.Apple's Photos app supports photo books, too. As a matter of fact, ordering photo books has been part of the now phased-out iPhoto app for almost a decade.
Archive photosAside from photo books, today's update includes the Archive feature.
Chances are your photo library includes not only your selfies, food shots and cherished memories, but the more mundane pictures as well, like recipes, receipts, scanned documents and so forth.
Now you can move images to the app's new Archive section to tidy up your photo grid.
To get started, simply select a few photos you'd like to archive, tap the Menu icon and choose Archive from the popup menu. This simply moves the selected photos to your archive rather than delete them. Any archived images and videos remain visible in search and albums.
Aside from the image archival feature and photo books, this update includes performance improvements and reduces the amount of on-device storage space used by the app.
Instagram yesterday announced a pair of minor updates for Direct, a direct-messaging feature built into its mainland mobile app for iOS and Android. For starters, Instagram Direct now supports sending images and videos in portrait and landscape orientations.
Plus, Instagram is just now offering support for sending links in direct messages.
The ability to send a permanent photo or video in landscape and portrait orientations through Direct means you no longer have to worry about weirdly cropping it as it will now show up properly in its intended orientation.
“We’ve added support for links in Direct,” noted the company. “You can share website links with friends and preview them directly from your thread.” As a bonus, the team also has implemented automatic links to phone numbers and addresses send through Direct.
Landscape and portrait uploads in Direct are available today on iOS, with Android coming soon. Links in Direct messages are available today on both iOS and Android.
Today's features are part of Instagram's version 10.22 update.
Grab Instagram for free via App Store.
Apple is said to have developed a next-generation Touch ID sensor where an OLED display of the device doubles as a fingerprint sensor. This should enable users to rest their finger on the display to authenticate themselves.
According to a Chinese-language Economic Daily News report, citing sources from Apple's chip supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Apple has managed to develop an optical fingerprint sensor to enable authentication directly on the screen.
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo first called it in January.
He said because Touch ID’s capacitive sensor does not work through the display’s cover glass, Apple could go with an optical sensor which doesn’t require physical contact with a user’s finger.
Other iPhone 8 features, according to a TSMC source, include no physical Home button, the screen ratio of 18.5:9 instead of the previous 16:9 and invisible infrared image sensors to enhance camera functionality and enable augmented reality features.
Apple is understood to have been plagued with yield issues regarding the new optical fingerprint sensor. It's unclear if the company has managed to resolve those technical issues.
Mac Otakara on Thursday published a slew of photos and a video comparing the size of an alleged iPhone 8 case to the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. The noted Japanese outlet says it purchased the case from Alibaba, and its dimensions match up with previous information.
The case itself is pretty uninteresting, but seeing it next to both a 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch iPhone gives us a good idea of how big the iPhone 8 could be, should the leaks prove authentic. Notice how the iPhone 8 case is only slightly taller and a hair wider than the iPhone 7.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-vzLBN3K-Y
Rumor has it that the iPhone 8 will house an edge-to-edge display, with ultra slim or no bezels, allowing Apple to fit a much larger screen in a smaller body. The case in these photos seemingly corroborates that theory, as it sits significantly smaller than the iPhone 7 Plus. Other details worth noting in regards to the case include a cutout for the often-rumored vertically-stacked dual lens camera, and the usual openings for volume rocker and power switches.
The iPhone 8 isn't expected to be revealed until September, and Apple is known to test multiple prototypes, so it's impossible to tell if this case is truly based on the handset's final design. We should see more leaks as Apple ramps up production later this summer.
Source: Mac Otakara
Apple is going to once again be providing a live stream of its WWDC keynote address this year. On Thursday the company updated its website with a new page noting that a stream of the keynote will go live on June 5th at 10am PDT.
You will be able to tune in on your Mac and iOS devices, using the Safari browser, and of course on Apple TV. Second and third gen models of the set-top box will feature an Events channel, and fourth-gen models will get a standalone app.
Apple is expected to use the keynote to introduce the next major versions of its four platforms: iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS. There's also been rumors speculating that the company will debut new Mac and iPad hardware during the event.
Even if you plan on watching the keynote, be sure to join us here at iDB that Monday. As usual we'll be covering the event live, as well as all subsequent announcements and releases, so you'll be able to keep up with the news throughout the day.
Source: Apple
Apple celebrated Earth Day 2017 by announcing a partnership with World Wildlife Fund, promoting environmentally-focused apps on App Store and posting cartoonish videos on YouTube detailing its efforts to preserve our environment for generations to come.
Today, more than a month after Earth Day took place, it shared another Earth Day video on YouTube, titled “Does my iPhone believe in incarnation?” and featuring its recycling robot Liam.
The clip was created to celebrate Apple's attendance at Sustainable Brands 2017, a Detroit conference where Sarah Chandler, Apple's Director of Operations and Environmental Initiatives, discussed Apple's plan to reduce the environmental impact of its supply chain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDXy5bEG38w “Lisa Jackson, Apple’s lead on Environment work, and our recycling robot Liam will make you believe,” reads the video's description. “Lisa and her team explain it all, while Liam disassembles your iPhone 6 so those parts can find new life.”
Bt taking apart used products, Apple is able to recycle rare earth materials and other valuable metals and send them back to its supply chain for further processing to be eventually reused in the production of components for new products.
According to the video, L.I.A.M. stands for “Liberate. iPhone. Auto-Disassembly. Machine”
Question: why does the video briefly show Tim Cook holding a bunny?
Facebook is rolling out new tools today to help publishers who post Instant Articles on the Facebook platform make their fast-loading news stories compatible with the Apple News format and Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages.
According to the social networking giant, an updated Instant Articles SDK, now available on GitHub, allows publishers to build content publishable as Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Support for Apple News articles is coming soon, says Facebook.
Politico reported today that Apple has created a new Editor-in-Chief position on Apple News. The Cupertino giant hired Lauren Kern, former Executive Editor at New York Magazine, for the newly created position.
Facebook's updated SDK removes a time and resource-consuming step in publishing on multiple platforms by having the markup publishers use to create Instant Articles automatically generate the code needed to build these other formats.
For instance, any custom formats—things like fonts, colors and captions—that publishers have designed in the Style Editor will now be “closely mirrored” in the other formats.
The company wrote:
Media executives told us about the challenge they face using multiple platforms to share their stories–more distribution formats create more content management costs.
Developers who attended our Journalism Project Hackathons in New York and London also asked for a way Instant Articles could support other major publishing formats.
Instant Articles debuted as an iPhone exclusive in May 2015.
Rival Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages in October the same year. Both features aim to make news articles from participating publishers load in a fraction of a second on mobile devices than their non-optimized versions.
Both Google and Facebook want to speed up webpage loading times, especially for users in emerging markets and those on unreliable or slow Internet connections. The faster the page loads, the more likely the user is to actually read the article. And the more news articles users consume on any given day, the more ads they'll see.
Instant Articles have been criticized for being confined to Facebook's wall garden and their ad system. As for Accelerated Mobile Pages, Google is giving them preferential treatment in search results, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
While these pages do load significantly faster versus the regular mobile pages, all Accelerated Mobile Pages implement Google's own scrolling behavior that feels weird on iOS while making it harder than necessary to visit the original article.
Accelerated pages have their own unique URLs. To visit the original article, you must first tap the hyperlink icon at the top of the page to reveal the original URL, then tap the URL to visit the original page on the publisher's website.
The worst thing about Google's accelerated pages is the fat that they don't let you use Safari's clutter-free Reader Mode or the Find in Page feature, available from the Share menu.
If you're no longer interested in playing Pokémon GO on a regular basis, how about another mobile Pokémon game? Your wish is Pokémon Company's command! Today, they released a new Pokémon game on App Store, based on the weakest Pokémon ever— Magikarp.
Titled Pokémon Magikarp Jump and available on App Store as a freemium download with optional In-App Purchases, the game requires you to raise multiple generations of Magikarp.
You must feed and train your creatures, boosting their stats and Jump Power before challenging other players in six leagues to increase your own Trainer Rank. Those who do well in jumping tournaments can get commemorative photos of their achievement that can be shared on social media to show the world how well they’ve trained their Magikarp.
If you're new to the Pokémon phenomenon, here's a little backgrounder on Magikarp.
Magikarp is a creature famous for being pathetically weak, unreliable and generally useless. It cannot be taught any powerful moves—all it does is flop around and splash. If your Magikarp flops too high, it is sometimes snagged by the bird Pokémon Pidgeotto.
Check out the launch trailer below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ0c9s5UoMI
If Magikarp gets knocked out during a training session, or retires upon reaching level 20, you’ll start over with a new generation of Magikarp that's a little bit stronger than your last.
Some Pokémon you encounter may give you food to keep your Magikarp nourished.
Following the initial launch in Italy, Japan and several other countries, Pokémon Magikarp Jump is now officially available in the US App Store. Non-obligatory In-App Purchases let you spend cash on various upgrades to speed up your training, replenish your food stock, catch more Magikarp and so forth.
Grab Pokémon Magikarp Jump for free from US App Store.