Benjamin Mayo

Apple Music gets a bunch of nice feature enhancements in iOS 14 including autoplay and a whole new iPad-optimized layout. However, it appears the app is adding something that has not been previously announced: animated artwork for Apple Music playlists.

Apple’s poster art for playlists has always looked amazing, and the company has commissioned much of it from artists that work on real album covers. Now, it is going one step further and actually animating that art …

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This morning, Asian technology publication Nikkei posted its latest report on Apple’s upcoming iPhone lineup, corroborating much of what has been known via other sources.

Nikkei says that the iPhone 12 will consist of four new models and each will be equipped with an OLED display. This will be the first time all of Apple’s flagship phones use OLED screen technology which offers true blacks and better contrast; for instance, the cheaper iPhone 11 models use LCD displays. Nikkei also confirms what has been previously reported about the iPhone’s lack of bundled accessories.

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Apple has today launched an online dashboard for Apple Card users to manage their account online. Previously, all interactions for the Apple Card took place through the Wallet app on the iPhone.

This now means you can view your statements and pay your Apple Card bill online, for the first time. Before today, the only way to pay off your balance if you lost your iPhone was to call Goldman Sach’s telephone support.

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Apple developers have started receiving their Developer Transition Kit hardware, which Apple is distributing to developers to help them get their apps ready for the upcoming range of Apple Silicon Macs, which will replace Intel CPUs with Apple-designed ARM CPUs.

Despite the confidentiality clauses in the developer agreement, benchmarks for the Developer Transition Kit have already surfaced on Geekbench. Note that these tests are running under virtualization, using Apple’s Rosetta technology, as the Geekbench testing software has not yet been optimised for Apple Silicon.

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Apple is set to be significantly slimming its packaging for its upcoming iPhone line. The analyst previously said that Apple will no longer include wired earbuds with the iPhone 12, and today reports that he also expects the power adapter to now be sold separately too.

Kuo says that Apple wants to keep selling the iPhone 12 at a similar price to the iPhone 11 and removing in-box accessories will offset the cost of the 5G networking components. This will presumably reduce the size of the iPhone packaging considerably, helping lower Apple’s freight costs and be better for the environment.

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Traditionally at WWDC, Apple blogger John Gruber hosts a live edition of the Talk Show podcast, usually featuring one or more Apple executives for an interview on the week’s announcements. Obviously, an in-person wasn’t possible this year. Instead, Apple SVP Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak join John Gruber for a video conversation.

Topics include the transition from Intel CPUs to Apple SoC’s for future Macs, the new macOS Big Sur visual design, SwiftUI, and more.

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Apple has added a new banner alert to iOS 14 that lets users know if an app is pasting from the clipboard and therefore able to read the clipboard’s contents. This is part of iOS 14’s privacy controls, and follows an investigation from Mysk earlier this year that drew attention to the issue.

In the current iOS beta seed, this alert appears anytime a paste operation happens. This sounds fine in principle. However, many popular apps check the clipboard proactively to do some smart action. For instance, the Reddit client Apollo checks the clipboard to see if the user has copied a Reddit link, and offer to take them right to it in the app. This means that the banner appears every time the app is launched…

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iOS 14 brings major new features like the home screen updates, widgets, new privacy controls, and updates to features like Siri and HomeKit. But Apple has also taken the time to work on some pretty big feature improvements for many of its core apps.

One of these is the Music app. Apple continues to aggressively compete against Spotify in the streaming music race, and iOS 14 takes that one step further. Here’s what’s new in Music for iOS 14.

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The iPhone 11 Pro comes with an 18 W USB-C power adapter, but the cheaper iPhone 11 still only comes with the 5 W charger.

For at least some models of the iPhone 12, it now appears Apple is upgrading the power adapter to a new 20 W USB-C adapter. The photos were posted today by leaker Mr white on Twitter.

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One of the design changes in watchOS 7 is the removal of the Force Touch gesture. The watch will no longer detect firm presses on the display. Apple has updated many apps that previously hid buttons in the Force Touch contextual menu to instead show those controls as onscreen tappable buttons.

This also affects how to change the home screen layout. With previous version of watchOS, you could change between list view and grid view simply by firmly pressing on the home screen. Now, you have to dive into the Settings app.

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With iOS 14, Apple has finally added an emoji search field to the stock keyboard. Although the UI is still a bit wacky in the initial iOS 14 developer beta, the functionality does work. Now, when you tap on the emoji button in the bottom left of the keyboard, there is a new search field above the row of emoji.

You can then type in a keyword like ‘happy’ and see a strip of emojis that match the corresponding search text. You can then tap on the emoji to insert them into the text you are typing.

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We haven’t got many details on this yet, but a slide in the WWDC presentation reveals that Apple is updating the HomePod to support third-party music services, like Spotify. Right now, the HomePod only works natively with Apple Music.

Presumably, this will require apps to update to integrate with a new API or framework that allows their services to run on the HomePod itself. Theoretically, this means the HomePod can now be controlled by Spotify, although Spotify is yet to commit to a release timeframe. This will be the first time Apple has allowed third-party software to run natively on the HomePod hardware.

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Apple today announced iPadOS 14 with a slew of new features, including non-modal Siri and search experiences, home screen widgets, system-wide translation, deeper Apple Pencil integration, and much more.

iPadOS 14 is available today in developer beta and will be available this fall for all users. In even better news, all iPads that run iPadOS 13 will be able to update to the newest version of Apple’s mobile operating system.

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As part of the iOS 14 fanfare, Apple has finally updated the appearance of incoming calls on iPhone and iPad. Previously, incoming calls would take over the screen and interrupt what you were doing. Now, they appear as simple banners that come down from the top of the screen like a normal notification alert.

The phone call can be accepted with a simple tap on the green button, or declined with a tap of the red button. Stay tuned for our hands-on with iOS 14 as the betas drop imminently.

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To help developers transition their Intel Mac apps to run on forthcoming ARM Macs, Apple is offering developers a new Developer Transition Kit. This is Mac mini hardware featuring an A12X CPU. Apple will start shipping these developer kits later this week.

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Apple has just announced its plans to switch from Intel CPUs in Macs to silicon of its own design, based on the ARM architecture. This means that Apple is now designing its own chips for iOS devices and its Mac desktop and laptops. Apple said it will ship its first ARM Mac before the end of the year, and complete the Intel -> ARM transition within two years.

Apple will bring industry leading performance and performance-by-watt with its custom silicon. Apple’s chips will combine custom CPU, GPU, SSD controller and many other components. The Apple silicon will include the Neural Engine for machine learning applications.

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Apple today announced the next version of macOS, named Big Sur. It features a UI overhaul that brings it closer to iOS in style. Many buttons are now chromeless and highlight as you mouse over. There is a lot more translucency, and app icons in the Dock now resemble their iOS counterparts too.

macOS Big Sur also brings Control Center to the desktop for the first time with quick access to brightness and other toggles.

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