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On Wednesday, the Unicode Consortium released Unicode 8, the next major update to the Unicode Standard. The Standard defines things like special characters and emoji, which many manufacturers, including Apple, use in their software.
Unicode 8 introduces nearly 8,000 new characters, including letters to support new languages and six new scripts. Perhaps more interesting, to us anyway, is that it also includes 37 new emoji and 5 emoji modifiers for various skin colors.
Soon, it looks like your iPhone won't need Wi-Fi to use Apple's awesome Continuity feature. As noted by the Verge, the iOS 9 beta seeded to developers earlier this week includes support for the feature over a cellular connection.
For those not familiar with it, Continuity was introduced in iOS 8 and it allows you to answer calls and messages on your Mac or iPad as long as they are on the same network as your iPhone. In iOS 9, that's no longer a requirement.
Monday's WWDC 2015 keynote talk was a jam-packed day of announcements that included iOS 9, OS X El Capitan, watchOS 2, Apple Music, the News app and updates to Apple Pay, so much so that Tim Cook had to immediately cut to the chase and skip his opening round of business updates (“Everything is going fine”, he joked).
There just wasn't enough time to talk about every little enhancement and nice-to-have so Apple execs focused on big ones that make for great headlines while relegating a bunch of platform updates, that mostly matter to developers anyway, to a single slide.
My colleague Cody already compiled an interesting list of nearly three-dozen features in iOS 9 that Apple didn't talk about during the keynote. If you've found his post compelling, you may be interested in my list of technological improvements in OS X El Capitan that Apple didn't show on stage.
Apple has taken the stage this morning inside San Francisco's Moscone West to deliver the latest advancements to its three crucial platforms: iOS, OS X and watchOS.
According to Apple, registered Mac developers will have their chance to download the first beta of OS X 10.11 El Capitan later today, which just got officially announced, after the event has wrapped up (currently, Apple's portal for developers is down).
This complete guide shows you how to upload photos and videos stored inside your Mac's Photos app (your entire macOS Photo Library) or a Finder folder to Google Photos. We show you both automatic and manual methods.
If you set up a Yahoo account on your Mac, iPhone, iPod touch or iPad in order to sync data with Yahoo Contacts and access Yahoo Mail through Apple's stock Mail app, you should read this.
According to the Internet firm, Mail and Contacts syncing on older Mac and iOS devices will no longer be supported after June 15. In addition, a number of Yahoo properties will close in the coming weeks, including Yahoo Maps.
Better late than never! Developer Tapbots has at last unleashed a major update to its popular Twitter client for OS X. Tweetbot 2 for Mac is now available as a free update for existing Tweetbot users. For new users, the application is now available at a discounted price of $12.99, down from its regular asking price of $19.99.
Aside from a fresh coat of paint and a dark translucent appearance on Yosemite systems, Tweetbot 2 for Mac sports an improved timeline search feature, optional verified badges, a three-pane layout that brings order to your lists, an iOS-style interface in the tweet detail view, the ability to see a user's recent photos and more.
There never seems to be a shortage of apps that promote focusing on a single task, especially writing apps. And then you have hardware like the iPad, which forces you to focus on a single app at a time.
With the Mac, focusing has never been that easy, because multitasking is at its core.
HazeOver is a new Mac App Store utility that seeks to change the way we work on the Mac. By dimming background apps, it aims to help users focus on one app at a time by reducing distractions from surrounding apps. You can still have other apps open, they’ll just be dimmed in such a way that they’re less noticeable.
Does the idea work? Check out our video walkthrough for all of the details.
6Wunderkinder GmbH, the makers of Wunderlist, the popular to-do, list and tasks application for the Mac, iOS, Apple Watch and other platforms, confirmed today it's being acquired by software giant Microsoft.
With more than thirteen million users across platforms and more than one billion to-dos created in Wunderlist, the app should seamlessly fit in Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's mobile first, cloud first vision.
But don't fret, mobile Wunderlist apps aren't going anywhere, at least for the time being. “As Wunderlist becomes a part of the Microsoft family, we’ll introduce a host of new features, keep adding partner integrations, and progress further in delivering Wunderlist to billions of people,” Christian Reber, 6Wunderkinder founder and CEO said Tuesday.
The ability to snap windows side-by-side has been one of my most missed features since switching from Microsoft Windows years ago. Fortunately, there have been quite a few apps over the years that have provided window snapping on the Mac.
One such app, HyperDock, has been my go-to app of sorts for managing windows on OS X. Another app, BetterSnapTool, is also popular among Mac users for window management.
But today, Sebastien made me aware of yet another window management tool. I have to admit that I was skeptical at first, because I've I didn't see how anything could be much better than HyperDoc for my needs, but I stand corrected.
Magnet ($1.99) is a really good Mac App Store release that focuses solely on window management, and does a very good job. It has several key features that have made me seriously contemplate switching over to it full time. Watch our video review to see what I mean.
An odd software bug which causes the iPhone's Messages application to crash and sends the handset into a respring after a certain text is received affects the iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, too. In addition, the text bug apparently affects third-party social and messaging apps that deal with text, including WhatsApp, Twitter and Snapchat, The Guardian newspaper learned today.
That's hardly surprising. The issue can be traced back to a specific series of Unicode characters, suggesting a bug in the text engine framework called CoreText that exists in iOS and OS X.
That would explain why third-party apps that deal with messages, like Twitter and Snapchat, were affected as they tap into Apple's CoreText engine to manage strings of text and layouts.
If you purchased Apple's new fifteen-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display and Force Touch trackpad, congratulate yourself as you're the proud owner of Apple's very first notebook capable of driving external displays in glorious 5K resolution.
The new 15-inch MacBook Pro also support single-stream 4K screens at a 4,096-by-2,160 display resolution at 60Hz, another first for Apple.