This week, Ray, Tom and Sean look at some of the news coming out of Apple’s annual Wordwide Developers Conference (WWDC), including the unveiling of the latest version of the iOS mobile operating system and the new music streaming app Apple Music. That and much more on this week’s Deemable Tech!
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THIS WEEK’S RUN DOWN
Apple WWDC 2015
This week Apple held their annual conference to showcase its new software to developers. Since there was so much to talk about, we are just going to focus on the stuff we found really interesting. For full coverage of the announcements made at WWDC 2015, check out iMore’s article about everything you need to know about they keynote.
iOS 9 to offer ad blocking
Apple unveiled the latest version of its mobile operating system this week, and with it comes a host of new features. iOS 9 is going to have ad blocking for the first time ever. Specifically, Safari is going to allow extensions that include the ability to block ads. Publishers that depend on ad revenue to stay in business are super excited about this announcement.
Six-digit passcodes
In an effort to make their devices harder to break into, Apple revealed that newer iPhones and iPads that have TouchID and are running iOS 9 will be required to upgrade from a four-digit passcode to a six-digit one. Passcodes will remain optional, but if you choose to use one you will have to change it to at least six alphanumeric digits.
Another safeguard they introduced: after 10 failed attempts to enter your passcode, your device will erase itself.
iOS 9 brings multitasking to iPads
iOS 9 will also introduce a long-expected feature for iPads: multitasking. This comes in the form of three features, actually, called SlideOver, Splitview and picture-in-picture.
SlideOver will let you quickly slide in another app from a menu on the right side of the screen. For example, you could be using Safari to read restaurant reviews and then slide in Messages to message your friend. Other apps they showed taking advantage of this feature were the Calendar app and Notes.
There will also be a more traditional Split View mode where you can have your screen equally divided up between two apps running simultaneously and independent of each other.
There will also be a picture-in-picture mode that will let you have a small video player on top of other apps. Yes, Apple has finally added a feature all of our TVs had in 1993.
Not all of these features will be available on all devices. The Split View mode will only work on the iPad Air 2. SlideOver and picture-in-picture will be available on late 2013 or newer iPad Airs as well as all iPad Minis.
iOS 9 brings battery life, performance boost
Apple says that iOS 9 is all about making the existing hardware run better. They said that they have seen an extra hour of battery life on the iPhone 6, and iOS 9 has a new lower power mode that can save iPhones an additional 3 hours of battery life.
Apple News
Apple News is Apple’s latest attempt to disrupt a dying industry. This new app will be built into iOS 9, but fortunately it will replace the utterly useless hunk of trash app that was Newsstand. Instead of being what was essentially a folder for news and magazine apps, Apple News is going to be a a news curator app. You’ll be able to read Sport Illustrated, the New York Times, Wired and tons of other top tier media and some not so top tier media like local newspapers, TV and radio stations.
According to Apple, the new app learns what you like and suggests similar content. We’ll believe that when I see it. The promise of learning content has always been higher than the actual end product.
Apple News can include a lot of interactive features like charts, graphs, videos, and photos. So, it’s basically just like Flipboard, except it’s built into your iPhone. So, it’s going to destroy Flipboard.
Apple Swift programming language will be open-sourced
Apple Swift programming language is going to be open-sourced. For the first time ever, developers will be able to create apps for iOS and OS X on a computer that isn’t a Mac OS X. Don’t get too excited Windows Developers, it only runs on Linux.
Apple Music
Apple’s “one more thing” this year was Apple Music. Apple basically took Beats Music, Ping (you guys remember Ping, right?) and the new MySpace (you guys remember MySpace, right?) and stuck them in a Blendtec blender and poured out what was left and called it Apple Music. With Apple Music, you can listen for free to a 24 hour online radio stream called Beats 1, or you can listen to streaming music on-demand for $9.99 for a single membership or $14.99 for a family of up to six. They’ll give you a free, three?month trial membership to get you hooked too.
So, yeah, Apple created a Spotify killer. Built into the iPhone and you’ll be able to get it on Android too. That’s fine, but apparently Apple thinks that you don’t have enough social media accounts in your life, and you need one dedicated to communicating with your favorite artists with. You know, just like they thought when they came out with Ping. And it flopped. And, just like Justin Timberlake and the gang thought when they bought MySpace from News Corp and relaunched it as a social media site for musicians, and it? well we don’t know what happened to it because we’ve never been back for more than enough time to download our pictures and videos. But we’ve heard it’s a barren wasteland.
On Apple Music, you’ll be able to get exclusive content like behind-the-scenes videos, intimate conversations with the artists and musicians can post blogs and updates on Apple Music. You know, just like they can do on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and their own website.
Oculus Rift reveals consumer version of virtual reality headset
Oculus Rift held a major live event this week, officially unveiling the consumer version of their long-awaited, greatly hyped VR headset. Purportedly light and comfortable, the headset slips on like a baseball cap, is easily adjustable, and allows users to substitute their own headphones for the pair that comes with it. The screen is actually a pair of small, high-res LED screens set right in front of the user?s eyes.
Two controllers were announced. The one that it will ship with? The Xbox One wireless controller. Yep. A slightly more revolutionary controller called the Oculus Touch was also announced: this is a pair of thumbsticks with motion tracking and haptic feedback which the user holds in each hand. The Touch will release in 2016 but is not expected to be available when the Oculus Rift first launches.
Speaking of launching, you are probably wondering when exactly the Rift will launch and how much it will cost. That was one thing the press conference did not shed any light on. The company still says that it is targeting 2016 and there are rumors of a price point around $400.
Comcast takes away woman’s email address, gives it to new customer with the same name
Cable internet provider Comcast is infamous for their poor customer service, and this next story is not going to help their reputation any. Ken Amaro of First Coast News reports that Comcast took thirteen year veteran customer Kathleen Cox?s email address away and gave it to another customer with the same name who had just signed up in Michigan. Kathleen had used her Comcast email address as her primary email account and when it was taken away lost access to all her emails. She said that it wasn?t until local news took up the story that Comcast finally returned the address to her. No word on whether she got her old emails back as well.
Google Chrome will start pausing auto-playing Flash videos
Google says that their next version of Chrome will roll out a feature that “intelligently pauses” Flash content that isn?t central to the web page. This is in the interest of memory and battery life for laptops. By some estimates, disabling Flash while using Chrome on your laptop could give you 10-20% more battery life.
PornHub crowdfunding sex tape shot in space
Major porn site PornHub has launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGogo to raise money to shoot a sex tape in space. The campaign is looking for $3.4 million in funding which takes into account chartering the flight, insurance, crew, equipment, as well as backer perks. PornHub has not specified who exactly they plan to fly with or the exact date they plan to film on. They do, however, have the actors picked out.
Facebook payments
And here’s a story we apparently overlooked back in March that recently came to our attention. You can send your friends on Facebook money through Facebook messenger. If you have a debit card on file with Facebook (perhaps you have bought an ad or a dumb game), when you message someone on the Facebook messenger either the app or on the desktop website, you’ll see a dollar sign with a circle around it. Click that button and you can send your friends money. Right now it doesn’t cost anything to send or receive money via Facebook Messenger. Fortunately, you can set a PIN code for payments so that when you accidently leave your Facebook profile logged in and your friend or girlfriend “hacks” you, he or she won’t be able to transfer all of your money to a new account.
Reddit bans FatPeople Hate subreddit, throws angry redditors into an uproar
Reddit, which bills itself as ?the front page of the internet?, and is of course where post the news stories we are working on for this podcast, saw some major drama this week. Reddit has long had a policy of allowing people to create subreddits around virtually any topic they want, even when those topics are awful. There are subreddits devoted to racism, bigotry, and all kinds of vile stuff. Reddit generally leaves them alone, unless they start crossing certain lines.
This week, apparently, lines were crossed. Reddit banned five subreddits, the largest of which was one called FatPeopleHate, which boasted over 150,000 subscribers. At the risk of editorializing, FatPeopleHate was actually even worse than it sounded, as redditors there had linked to the Twitter feeds, YouTube channels and personal information of real people, allowing other redditors to pour abuse, bile and mockery on them. FatPeopleHate had also become very popular and was regularly voting threads to the top of reddit?s /r/all, the ?front page? of the internet?s front page.
Reddit said that FatPeopleHate and the other four subreddits had crossed the line by getting involved in harassment instead of just being about ideas. This did not go down well with a very vocal part of reddit?s userbase, who begin creating a flood of alternate subreddits like FatPeopleHate2 and FatterPeopleHate and filling up unrelated subreddits with angry posts about reddit CEO Ellen Pao.
This is not the first time reddit has had problems moderating its own users. There was similar outrage when it tried to crackdown on users posting images from the nude celebrity leaks last year and before that when it attempted to purge subreddits dedicated to ?creepshots?, where men shared sexualized pictures taken of women without their consent.
The problem for reddit is that it doesn?t even require an email address to sign up for the service, and creating a new subreddit is the work of a moment, thus creating a situation that is very difficult to moderate.
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