Apple says CarPlay will now support third party navigation and mapping apps

Apple says CarPlay will now support third party navigation and mapping apps

Techogun   June 04, 2018

Big news for CarPlay, Apple’s in-car service that lets a vehicle’s display act as a controller and ‘reader’ of your iPhone: at WWCD, Apple today announced that it will now let third-party navigation and mapping apps to work with the service. Up to now, Apple only allowed its own mapping app, Maps, to work over CarPlay, but now you can use Waze, Google Maps, Here, or whatever other app you might want to use to get from A to B.

The change marks a big shift for Apple, which is well known for favoring its own native apps and generally a more tightly controlled ecosystem on iOS and across devices. But Maps hasn’t been the most popular mapping app by some measure, even for users of iOS. This is in a sense is a tacit acknowledgement that iPhone owners are using a wide variety of other services, and so to get CarPlay used more, this needed to be enabled.

Apple says that most major vehicle manufacturers are partnering with Apple to incorporate CarPlay, which gives iPhone users in-car access to its phone services, Apple Music, iMessage, Apple Books (new name!) and podcasts, along with a selection of third-party apps like Spotify, Google Play Music, NPR and iHeartRadio, as well as Siri support.

It’s not clear why Apple didn’t extend third-party support for other mapping and navigation apps until now. Perhaps it was to sweeten the deal for more people to use its own Maps app.

It’s not clear how many users there are of CarPlay, nor how many cars are now equipped to work with it, but the hope, it seems, is that with increased usefulness, now the service will see more adoption.

With iOS 12, Apple focuses on performance

With iOS 12, Apple focuses on performance

Techogun   June 04, 2018

Apple’s Craig Federighi announced that Apple was doubling down on performance with the upcoming release of iOS 12 at the WWDC event in San Jose, CA today.

What’s more, he said, the company would be making these changes to the full range of iOS devices going back to 2013. “And so for iOS 12, we are doubling down on performance from top to bottom making improvements to make.your device faster and more responsive. And because we want these changes to be available the full range of our customers, iOS 12 will be available on all the same devices as iOS 11,” Federighi told the WWDC audience.

Perhaps because customers were unhappy to learn about the battery issues with older iOS devices Federighi stressed that Apple has focussed these performance increases on older devices, giving people with older iPhones, the maximum lift. Using the iPhone 6 as an example, he gave some figures about performance increase, stressing that it was still early days. (As an iPhone 6 user, I was listening carefully.)

“Now on that device, iOS delivers a number of improvements. Across common operations you’ll see that apps launch up to 40% faster, the keyboard can come up to 50% faster and you can slide to take a photo at up to 70% faster,” he said.

But he said, the biggest focus, and one all iPhone users can appreciate, is that they are working to optimize performance when it’s under load. As Federighi said that’s when you need performance the most and where iOS 12 really shines.

“We put iOS 12 through our stress tests and we saw in those conditions share sheet coming up twice as fast, and apps launching twice as fast. These are big, big improvements,” he stressed.

Lastly, Apple also optimized iOS 12 at the chip level working with the chip team to optimize performance, while taking battery life into account. If you keep the power pedal to the medal for too long, you suck battery, but Apple is trying to find that perfect balance of power and battery life in iOS 12.

“CPUs traditionally respond to an increased demand for performance by slowly ramping up their clock speed. Well, now in iOS 12, we’re much smarter. When we detect that you need a performance lift when you’re scrolling and launching an app, we ramped up processor performance instantly to its highest state delivering high performance and a ramp it down just as fast to preserve battery life,” he said.

All of this will be available when iOS 12 is released later this year.

Apple delivers big updates to its augmented reality platform

Apple delivers big updates to its augmented reality platform

Techogun   June 04, 2018

Apple began WWDC talking all about the update it’s delivering to its augmented reality platform, introducing ARKit 2 with iOS 12 which brings several big tech upgrades.

The company didn’t get a chance to showcase all of the things it’s adding to ARKit, but did touch on the big additions, which include improved face tracking, realistic rendering, 3D object detection, persistent experiences and shared experiences.

Apple released ARKit one year ago. The developer platform is based on technology which synthesized the relationship between the inertial sensors of Apple devices and their cameras to track their position in space. This positional tracking allows users to not only move around digital objects but fix those objects to physical places in an environment.

At Google I/O, we saw a new technology called Cloud Anchors which matches up what a pair of smartphone users are seeing in the cloud to allow for multiplayer, it’s not clear how Apple is doing this, but  what’s interesting about Google’s approach is that Cloud Anchors allows for multiplayer across platforms so Android and iOS users can pair up easily as well.

App Store hits 20M registered developers and $100B in revenues, 500M visitors per week

App Store hits 20M registered developers and $100B in revenues, 500M visitors per week

Techogun   June 04, 2018

Microsoft may have just acquired developer’s favorite code respository GitHub, but it is Apple where many of them are making a lot of money at the moment. Today at WWDC, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook announced that there are now 20 million registered developers on iOS, and collectively they have made about $100 billion in revenues, with the App Store bringing in some 500 million visitors per week.

“We’re also happy to announce that this week we’re going to achieve another huge milestone,” Cook said in his presentation. “The money that developers have earned through the App Store will top $100 billion.”

The figures underscore how Apple’s attention has continued to swing more firmly into its developer ecosystem and app marketplace, which is becoming a stronger engine of revenue generation as overall smartphone purchasing slows down in more saturated markets.

He also said that Swift, the programming language Apple developed and uses for its apps, is also picking up some strong momentum.

“It’s the fastest growing programming language out there,” he said. “Apple developers are using it in huge numbers, in fact over 350,000 apps have been written in Swift in the app store. We believe that coding is an essential skill and believe it should be offered by every school in the world. Learning to code has so many benefits, it developers problem solving, critical thinking skills.”

 

Apple introduces iOS 12

Apple introduces iOS 12

Techogun   June 04, 2018

Apple announced the next version of iOS at its WWDC developer conference. While iOS 12 won’t be available before the fall, it’s always interesting to get a sneak peek at the next version of iOS.

Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi first talked about some numbers. 81 percent of iOS users are currently running iOS 11. 6 percent of Android users are currently on the last version.

“For iOS 12, we’re doubling down on performance,” Federighi said. iOS 12 is going to be available on all devices that currently support iOS 11.

It’s interesting the Federighi talked about iOS 12 on the iPhone 6 Plus. Apps launch 40 percent faster, the keyboard comes up 50 percent faster and opening the camera is 70 percent faster.

You get the idea, the big new feature of iOS 12 is performance and optimization.

But it doesn’t mean that Apple didn’t think about new features. Apple has created a new file format for augmented reality called USDZ.

This is a developing post, please refresh for updates.

Facebook’s latest privacy blunder has already attracted Congressional ire

Facebook’s latest privacy blunder has already attracted Congressional ire

Techogun   June 04, 2018

The news that Facebook offered to partners until just recently a form of the friend-scraping capability it claimed to have discontinued back in 2014 has, within hours, brought rebuke and a call to action from the House of Representatives.

“It’s deeply concerning that Facebook continues to withhold critical details about the information it has and shares with others. This is just the latest example of Facebook only coming forward when forced to do so by a media outlet,” reads a statement from Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ).

Indeed, the question of whether and how a user’s friends’ data was being shared with third parties was brought up during Zuckerberg’s testimony. It is, after all, likely that this is the vector by which millions of users’ data was exfiltrated by agents both malicious and benign.

Facebook says it “disagrees” with the New York Times’ criticisms of its device-integrated APIs

In the same line of thinking as “don’t talk to the cops,” the CEO was almost certainly instructed not to volunteer any disadvantageous information unless directly asked. Therefore, it should surprise no one that he failed to mention that there existed until quite recently a similar program allowing third parties to collect data on unsuspecting friends.

It’s telling of Facebook’s current predicament that before they can adequately answer some questions, even more arise.

“Our Committee is also still waiting for a lot of answers from Facebook to questions Mr. Zuckerberg could not or would not answer at our hearing,” Pallone said.

He also called for the FTC to get involved: “The Federal Trade Commission must conduct a full review to determine if the consent decree was violated.” I’ve asked if the Representative will be appealing to the FTC directly, and or whether any existing investigation (the FTC is quiet about these) will be affected.

Pallone is just one among hundreds of Senators and Representatives, but he is one of the crew responsible for the pending Congressional Review Act rollback of the FCC’s new, weaker net neutrality rules. So it’s not a surprise to see him weigh in quickly on another tech issue. Here’s hoping it helps keep Facebook accountable.

Google’s Hangouts Meet will soon be compatible with hardware from Polycom and Cisco

Google’s Hangouts Meet will soon be compatible with hardware from Polycom and Cisco

Techogun   June 04, 2018

G Suite is about to get a slew of new integrations.

Hangouts Meet, for example, is Google’s designated video conferencing solution for businesses but while it’s easy enough to use, most businesses have already invested in similar solutions from the likes of Polycom and Cisco — or they have opted for Microsoft’s Skype for Business as their go-to service. Soon, however, businesses will get more options as Google today announced that anyone on those systems will now be able to join a Hangouts Meet video call as well. These integrations will go live in the coming weeks.

“Nothing’s more frustrating than hosting a meeting and having trouble getting people to join because of issues with technology—it can interrupt workflows and slow down productivity,” Rany Ng, Google’s director of product management for G Suite, writes in today’s announcement. “We want to make it easier for businesses to use meeting solutions, like Hangouts Meet, without worrying about compatibility with existing equipment.”

Google built this project in partnership with Pexip, a company that specialized in making meeting platform interoperable. Pexip’s specialty is Skype for Business but for this product, the company is clearly branching out and adding support for Hangouts Meet, too.

In addition to allowing users from more hardware platforms to join Meet calls, Google also today announced that it is making it easier for third-party conferencing services to integrate their services deeper into Google Calendar. So if you are using Webex, for example, you’ll be able to join a Webex call right from Calendar with just a single click. Google says Arkadin, GoToMeeting, LogMeIn, Dialpad, RingCentral, Vidyo and Vonage are currently building similar calendar plugins for their users.

And if you need a room to take those calls, Google also today announced that it is making it easier to view and book rooms that are stored in Exchange and Office 365 in Google Calendar. This integration will only go live in a few months, though.

That’s not all of the integration news today, though. Google is also making it easier to import data from SAP’s enterprise resource planning tools into Google Sheets and analyze it there.