Tech Industry

Mashable has conducted an interesting interview with Tim Cook on the eve of WWDC, one of Apple’s largest events of the year. Although WWDC is known for its product announcements, Apple will announce the next versions of iOS and OS X as well as a streaming music service, the interview revolved around Apple’s efforts on company employee diversity.

Asked about the lack of women at keynotes, Cook says “you’ll see a change tomorrow”. This suggests that women will indeed feature more prominently at Apple’s presentation. In the last ten years, the number of women at Apple’s events comes in at the low single digits, most recently Christy Turlington Burns. Apple’s developer sessions have better gender diversity in their speakers but these are viewable only by registered developers, not the general public.

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MacStories’ Federico Viticci has posted an interesting image of WWDC banners from the second-floor of Moscone West, the WWDC event venue.

These images show Apple highlighting its three platforms: iOS, OS X and watchOS. These banners do not follow the same pattern as previous years with dramatic photography in rectangular banners. These are more like full-height wall posters with simpler geometric logos. Each image has the name of Apple’s OS written in a light font-face (the image is not clear enough to see whether this is Sans Francisco) on a simple background of multicoloured translucent shapes.

What’s particularly striking about this photo is that it confirms a rebranding of Apple’s smartwatch operating system. On Apple’s current public marketing, the Apple Watch is described as running ‘Watch OS’. By these banners, it can be seen that the new name for this platform is actually ‘watchOS’.
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A new report by the Financial Times suggests that Apple is looking to change the 70/30 revenue share for certain types of App Store apps. The report claims that Apple wants to change the way revenue is distributed between developers and Apple for music, video and news apps.

The report is a bit circumspect as the timing of the change does not seem to be related to any particular incident, although potentially Apple is forced into cutting the share due to potential anticompetitive complaints with Apple Music, to be announced next week.

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Apple ranks in at number 5 on the latest Fortune 500, the annual list that ranks US companies by revenue, this time for fiscal year 2014. The company maintains its same position as last year behind Berkshire Hathaway (no. 4), Chevron (no. 3), Exxon Mobil (no. 2), and Wal-Mart Stores (no. 1).

While Apple comes in at fifth place for revenue, Fortune notes that it “boasts both the biggest profits of any company on the list ($39.5 billion) and the highest market value (more than $700 billion).”
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Jay-Z’s recently launched Tidal music streaming service, a competitor to Apple’s own services in more ways than one, is today getting a big update right before the debut of the new Apple Music streaming service next week at WWDC. A desktop app beta for both Mac and Windows, $4.99 student pricing, and ticketing features through Ticketmaster integration, all help set a high bar for Apple to impress us with its own announcements next week.

The new desktop app (pictured above) is arriving in beta and brings a few features that weren’t previously possible with the mobile and web apps. The announcement today also includes a refreshed design for the mobile apps:
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If you want quality, reliable tech support for your computer, get a Mac. That’s according to the results of a new Consumer Reports survey that ranked Apple top among PC manufacturers for technical support post-purchase for the ninth year running…
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Apple’s new 15-inch MacBook Pro is the first of Apple’s notebooks to officially support single-stream 4K displays at a full resolution of 4096×2160 at 60Hz. The new MacBook Pro is also the first to support 5K displays.
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Update: Pixelmator for iPhone is now available. Download it here.

Pixelmator is releasing an update to its iOS app tomorrow, making the app available on the iPhone for the first time ($4.99). The universal app means you can buy once and download Pixelmator on both iPad and iPhone. Existing iOS users of the app naturally get the iPhone version for free as an update. The new version also brings the Distort tools, like warp brushes, to the iOS app for the first time.

Pixelmator for iPhone works very similarly to the iPad version but scaled down for the smaller canvas. You can read our full review of the iPad app from last year. Rather than popover panels, selecting an action opens full-width menus encapsulating options. This is a necessary concession for the size of the display.

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After many complaints from the developer community about poor networking performance on Yosemite, the latest beta of OS X 10.10.4 has dropped discoveryd in favor of the old process used by previous versions of the Mac operating system. This should address many of the network stability issues introduced with Yosemite and its new networking stack.

The discoveryd process has been subject to much criticism in recent months as it causes users to regularly drop WiFi access and causes network shares to list many times over, due to bugs. Many developers, such as Craig Hockenberry, have complained about the buggy software and workarounds have been found to include substituting the older system (called mDNSResponder) back into Yosemite.

discoveryd would cause random crashes, duplicate names on the network and many other WiFi-relate bugs. In the latest beta, Apple appears to have applied the same fix as the enthusiasts by axing discoveryd completely.

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Reuters reported back in March that Microsoft planned to bring its Siri competitor Cortana to iOS, and Microsoft has now officially confirmed this in a blog post.

Today, we’re announcing a Cortana application for Android phones and for iPhones which works as a companion to Cortana on your Windows 10 PC. The ‘Phone Companion’ app on the PC will help you install the Cortana app from the Google Play or Apple App Store onto your phone so you’ll be able to take the intelligence of Cortana with you, wherever you go […]

The Cortana companion will be available for Android phones at the end of June and for iPhones later this year.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXREpLEwgOY]

While Microsoft is pitching the app as a companion to a Windows PC, it appears that most of the functionality will work in the iPhone app without the need for a Windows device, Microsoft saying that you can “make the same queries, ask the same questions” in the standalone app … 
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Popular accessory maker Anker has shown off its upcoming lineup of USB-C cables and adapters including USB-C to USB 2.0, 3.0, and USB-C solutions. Especially interesting for 12-inch MacBook users is Anker’s USB-C to Lightning cable — the first that I’ve seen from a reputable vendor — which will allow users to connect iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches with Lightning ports directly to Apple’s USB Type C-only notebook for charging and syncing.
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The timing for the launch of Apple’s planned web-based TV service may depend on if and when the company can secure the rights to include content from local TV stations, Re/code reports. While Apple has been believed to be working on service that bundles access to a handful of channels delivered over the Internet, the new report claims that Apple wants to include live local programming from TV stations to both broaden the appeal of the service — especially with cord cutters — and satisfy industry executives…
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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fZBqV_yMq4]

Spotify is announcing some big updates to its music streaming service today that brings a number of new features alongside more content in the form of video clips, audio shows, and podcasts.
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Shortly after announcing its lens accessory-compatible Ollocase for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, the popular Olloclip lens maker is out with a new Action Lens for the 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch iPhones. Olloclip Action Lens combines an ultra-wide lens for capturing action shots with a telephoto lens that adds 2x optical zoom to the iPhone camera. Using Action Lens with an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, you can create shots like these:
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