Mario Kart is coming to your phone!

In today’s episode of Wednesday’s Wonderful news (it’s totally a thing),  the ultimate good-time game Mario Kart will be available on mobile devices for the first time ever on 25 September.

That’s only 11 days away, guys.

It’s called Mario Kart Tour, bought to you by Nintendo (duh), who say:

“Mario Kart Tour is the first Mario Kart game for smart devices, put the pedal to the metal in courses inspired by real-world locations as well as Mario Kart series favorites.”

Mario Kart Tour will be available on Android and iOS from September 25 2019. Nintendo announced earlier this year that Mario Kart Tour will be free to try, but you’ll likely need in-app purchases to make it past a certain level. According to the App Store listing, in-app purchases range from $1.99 to $69.99.

See the trailer below!!

WWDC Keynote rundown

Welcome to our 2019 WWDC keynote round up! We have quite a bit to unpack here, so let’s gooo!

We start with a black-and-white video showing developers working from home, coding and designing. “While the world sleeps, you dream. Welcome to WWDC” Thanks guys!

Oh Hi Tim Cook! *waves*.

Mr Cook talks about all of the fancy fandangled services Apple launched earlier this year – Apple News+, Apple Arcade, Apple Card, and  lastly Apple TV Plus, which brings us to the trailer for an Apple original show which will premiere on AppleTV+ later this year, ‘For All Mankind’. The show is being produced by Ronald Moore, an executive producer of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, and looks intense and captivating.

Next up? tvOS 13 of course!

The new operating system for Apple TV has a redesigned home screen with multi-user support and personalized recommendations, new underwater 4K HDR screen savers that were filmed in collaboration with the BBC Natural History Units, updates to Apple Music, and will work with Apple Arcade and support the XBox 1S and the Playstation Dual-shock 4 game controllers.

tvOS 13 is available for Apple Developer Program members starting today, with the public beta of the software launching later in June.  tvOS 13 will be available for everyone in the fall for free.

WatchOS 6

Kevin Lynch comes out on stage to speak about watchOS, which will feature – you guessed it – more watch faces, but also a new App Store dedicated to Apple Watch, including independent apps, (!) as well as an Audio books app, a voice memo app and a calculator app. ( Yay calculator watches are back! )

There are also new health & fitness capabilities including a decibel meter app, ‘Noise App’ and a period tracking app, ‘Cycle tracking’.

iOS 13

Craig Federighi wants to talk to us about iOS 13. The updated operating system will launch twice as fast as iOS 12, and Face ID will unlock your phone 30% faster.

There’s now a dark mode, which sounds spooky, but really it’s just that now all your apps will now be available in black to make looking at your phone easier on your eyes in the dark.

There’s a complete redesign of the Reminders app with the ability to associate your to do list with reminders, as well as the option of tagging people.

Apple Music gets lyrics, and Notes has a brand-new gallery view and the ability to support shared folders. Apple Maps got some shiny new updates, with nicer detail, and Google Street View–style views of certain cities.

Privacy has very much come to the forefront of everyone’s  concerns when it comes to technology, and Apple are saying that that makes them concerned. So much concern! So now, Apple’s made it so that you can have the option to grant an app one-time access to your location instead of constantly, and the system will also prevent apps from using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth data to figure your location out.

Additionally, there’s a new ‘Sign In With Apple’ feature that lets you to sign in with websites and apps via Apple rather than through Google and Facebook, etc. You can also use your Apple ID to authenticate your login, and you can even keep your email address hidden by using a randomized email address generated by Apple. Logins can all be authenticated using Face ID or Touch ID.

There’s  also a new ‘Find My’ app for finding your iPhone or Mac even when there’s no WiFi or Cellular collection.

Messages now lets you set a name and a profile picture, so if you don’t have a contacts number saved – it doesn’t matter anymore! Youtube stars Patrick Stars and Desi Perkins ( or rather, their Memoji’s) tell us all about how there are further customization options for Memoji – including hair color, piercings, make up, etc. Memoji stickers will now be incorporated into emoji in the system keyboard.

Siri is completely machine built now, so instead  of snippets of an actress saying words looped together, her voice is completely synthetic and actually more natural sounding. You can also use her for messages whilst using AirPods, and a pretty cool AirPod feature? iOS 13 supports audio sharing, so you can share the audio of a movie or a song with another friend with a single tap — as long as they’re wearing AirPods.

There’s new photo and video editing features and a new way to organize the Photos app, which, using machine learning, will now separating your screenshots, duplicates, and receipts from the rest of your photo library.

Apple maps got a shiny new update too, with a new street view feature called “Look Around” that lets you see street-level imagery of a city, and the ability to share favorite restaurants or travel destinations with friends, and a Favorites section for navigating to frequent destinations.

Apple has made the first beta of iOS 13 available to developers for testing purposes today, and the public betas roll out in July.

Introducing iPadOS 
iPads now have their very own software operating system! Happy Operating System Day iPad! It features lots of multitasking capability, column views for digging into file hierarchy, the ability to plug in a USB drive, and iPad-native multitouch gestures. Everything shown on screen looks very intuitive and slick.

Now we get to the very impressive and cool Hardware  section of the keynote! – The new Mac Pro. 

Now hold on to your horses here, because there’s some crazy numbers coming up.  We’re talking up to a 28-core Intel Xeon processor, up to 1.5TB of ECC RAM, the ability to handle up to 300 watts of power and a “massive” heatsink that can run fully unconstrained at all times.

Two Thunderbolt 3 ports, two USB-A ports, and a 3.5mm audio jack, eight internal PCIe slots, four double-wide slots, three single-wide slots, and one additional half-length slot for an I/O card.

It also has wheels! Wheels!

Here’s some more numbers for you – The new Mac Pro will start at $5,999 with an eight-core Intel Xeon processor, 32GB of ECC RAM, AMD WX 7100 graphics, and 256GB of SSD storage.

To go with that shiny ( kind of cheese grater-y looking) computer? A very pretty new 32-inch 6K display named the Pro Display XDR which features a 6,016 x 3,384 resolution display and 20 million pixels, uses a direct backlighting system with a large array of LEDs, able to produce 1,000 nits of full-screen brightness and 1,600 nits of peak brightness.

The new screen has a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and can maintain 1,000 nits of full-screen brightness indefinitely, and also features Thunderbolt 3, which enables two monitors to run off a single power source, and up to four displays to be connected together for more screen real estate.

You can get one of those starting at $4,999, its stand for $999 and a VESA Mount Adapter for $199.

Both the display and the new Mac pro will be available in the Fall.

macOS 10.15 Catalina

iTunes is no longer! Byeeee Old Man iTunes! We will now have three dedicated apps: Apple Music, Apple Podcasts and Apple TV.
iPhone syncing and device storage management will now be located in Finder, which is one of the best things we heard in this whole keynote thing, really.
“Sidecar”is also really cool, and lets you use your iPad as a second display for your Mac.You can also now use voice control for accessibility using Siri, which ALSO is really really cool!

Activation Lock is coming to Macs (those of which have the newer T2 security chips) with iOS 10.15, as is Screen Time, so you can be shocked at ALL YOU DATA AND HOW MUCH TIME YOU SPEND WATCHING CAT VIDEOS

The Catalina OS beta is available today, while public seeds will be available in July. The OS becomes widely available in the fall.

We also saw another privacy/security concern addressed today, with Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering telling us about HomeKit Secure video, which uses your actual iPad, HomePod, or AppleTV, and then encrypts it and and sends it to a secure iCloud. HomeKit Secure Video even works with certain third-party camera providers, and the video storage and analysis doesn’t count toward your iCloud data limit.

So there we have it, some really neat new features across the software board, an amazing new MacPro, and some Memoji stickers. Oh – and some last cool things?

RealityKit, with photorealistic rendering, environment and camera effects, animation, physics and more, Reality Composer, where you can build interactive AR experiences, with a built-in AR content library, Xcode tool and iOS app. ARKit 3 with Motion Capture and People Occlusion and compositing of people in real time, AND New SwiftUI framework which requires much less coding to build UIs.

The future is real!

You can watch the  whole Keynote here, or shorter videos about everything that was announced today on Apple’s YouTube channel here. 

WWDC 2019!!

Apple’s 30th annual Worldwide Developers Conference will be from Monday, June 3rd and last until Friday, June 7th,  at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California.

The keynote will be held on the first day and will debut new software (iOS 13, macOS 10.15, tvOS 13, and watchOS 6) and… hopefully some new hardware too (Mac pro, new iPad?) .

From Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing:

“WWDC is Apple’s biggest event of the year. It brings thousands of the most creative and dedicated developers from around the world together with over a thousand Apple engineers to learn about our latest platform innovations and to connect as a community. Our developers are incredibly passionate about creating the next generation of mind-blowing experiences for the world through apps. We can’t wait to get together with them and share what’s next.”

Developers are able to register to attend here, and will be chosen using a lottery system, after which tickets are priced at $1599, although in order to enter the lottery to begin with, devs must have been a member of the Apple Developer Program or the Apple Developer Enterprise Program as of March 14, 2019 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time. Registration will be open until March 20, 2019 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time, and developers who win a ticket will be notified by March 21 at 5 p.m. Pacific Time.

If you aren’t lucky enough to be a chosen developer,  Apple is also making up to 350 WWDC Student Scholarships available to students and members of STEM organizations. Scholarships include a free WWDC ticket, free lodging, and a free one-year membership to the Apple Developer Program.

Sound awesome? Yup! All you need to do in order to enter to win is  create an interactive Swift Playground that can be experienced within three minutes. Apple is taking applications until Sunday, March 24, 2019 at 5:00 p.m. PDT, with scholarship winners to be notified by Monday, April 15.

You will also be able to livestream the keynote through the Apple Developer website or the dedicated WWDC app for iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

We’re sure to hear more about what to expect in the lead up and we’ll let you know anything we hear on the Apple vine!

iOS 8 now installed on lots of machines!

iOS 8 has been picked up by the Apple loving members of Society in a rather big way! The operating system launched in September alongside the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus and has since seen it’s  adoption rate zoom up to 68% of compatible iOS devices.

This is a four % jump since the last time Apple listed the adoption rate back on December 23rd. Hey all you guys who got new iPhones for Christmas? You should totally sell us your old stinky iPhones. Because we like old stinky iPhones, and we’ll give you cash! Win Win!

iOS 7 has had an understandable dropped to 29% and other iOS versions represent a mere 4% of the App store user base.

Apple gave developers a third beta of iOS 8.2 in December, which should be released imminently.  It apparently will include a load of bug fixes and support for Apple Watch integration.

Record week in the App store!

It’s a good time to be an Apple! The company is currently celebrating their recent successes, namely, Apple Pay customer growth, record breaking App store success and high job creation! Yay!

The first week in 2015 set a new record for Apple’s App Store, bringing in almost $500 million. Now that’s a tasty start to the new year. Apple are also celebrating the record breaking year that was 2014 for the App Store, with a 50% increase in billings, and developers earning more than $10 million from revenue.

“This year is off to a tremendous start after a record-breaking year for the App Store and our developer community,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “We’re so proud of the creativity and innovation developers bring to the apps they create for iOS users and that the developer community has now earned over $25 billion.”

So… 2014 was the time to turn that dumb idea that you secretly though was the best most genius thing ever into an App. But… we think it’ll probably work in 2015 too, so go knock that bad boy out of the park!

Apple is also celebrating Apple Pay customer growth, and job creation from the industry surrounding iOS and the App Store. With just over a million jobs created or supported by Apple in the U.S,  a massive 627,000 are related directly to iOS and the App Store.

You can see the full press release here!

Exciting tool revealed in iOS 8 Beta 5 released today!

This morning, Apple released the Beta 5 update to iOS 8 as well as OS X 10.10 Yosemite Developer preview 5 to developers. Aside from being good news indicating that things appear to be moving along relatively smoothly with the new iOS, there is something we think is particularly exciting being reported about the updates in iOS 8 Beta 5.

What’s so exciting iPhone Antidote? Well, kids, Healthkit now includes the addition of Spirometry.

Uh…. wha?

Spirometry! Apart from being an excellent word to say, (c’mon, say it aloud, you know it’ll make you feel good..) spirometry is the most common of the pulmonary function tests measuring lung function. It’s an important tool used for generating pneumotachographs, which are helpful in assessing conditions such as asthma, pulmonary fibrosis, cystic fibrosis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

We hate ALL those stupid things, so spirometry is a tool we’re excited to hear will be included in iOS 8.

The Health app was also updated with new icons for Body data, Data Exporting, and a new option for showing Medical ID on Emergency Lock screen. Those things are cool too, we guess.

Image from page 569 of “The science and practice of medicine” (1866) by Internet Book Archive Images is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

SKype free group messaging coming soon to iOS

Good news iOS folk! Last month, Skype began offering a group video calling feature to Windows Tablets! Them first!? Unfairses! Well, not really, because Skype is owned by Microsoft…

Up to 10 people can get in on this free group calling, which is great, obviously, for families, friends who are on different continents, long distance group relationships, etc. Get a stand for the tablet and it becomes room calling, except there’s 10 different rooms in your room. Did anyone say party?

Anyways. Skype has just announced that the group video calling feature will be coming to ALL mobile platforms, for FREE, in the next to near future. Which means iOS most likely, although it was not specified. Also not specified was the date, although people (who say that they’re) in the know say that this will happen before the year is out.

10 rooms within a room parties for ALL!

The Real Guide to Using Siri

Hands up who uses Siri?

A lot? Sometimes? Only to see if you can get funny answers?

There are a lot people that don’t know about mysterious Miss Siri. Did you know for example that you can do this with her?

No? Here’s part one of our complete rundown on Siri – what she is, what she can do to improve your life, and the future she can bring us.

Siri is an intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator. She’s basically an App, present on all Apple devices after Siri was acquired by Apple on April 28, 2010. The original application ceased to function on October 14, 2011.

She uses a natural language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of Web services. Apple claims that the software adapts to the user’s individual preferences over time and personalizes results.

Although a lot of people think SIRI stand for ‘Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface, the name Siri is actually Norwegian, meaning “beautiful woman who leads you to victory”. It was named after the intended name for the original developer’s first child.

Currently, Siri supports English (American, Canadian, Australian, British), French, German, Japanese, Italian (Italy, Switzerland), Spanish (Mexico, Spain), Mandarin (China, Taiwan), Korean, and Cantonese.

The original American voice was provided by Susan Bennett in July 2005. Now, in settings alongside your choice of language, you have an option of gender for Siri’s voice.

NOW, here’s the important stuff. Here’s what you can use Siri for to make your life more efficient:

SPORTS
Ask Siri for baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and soccer scores as well as schedules, rosters, and stats.

EATING
Ask Siri to search for restaurants or bars using different criteria. Siri will give you results based on these as well as photos, reviews, and reservations.

SOCIALISING
Siri can post to Facebook for you as well as on other people’s pages.

Siri can also tweet for you.

You can also search for recent tweets. Say, ” What is person’s name/company/brand saying?”  and Siri will show you their most recent Tweets.

LAZINESS

With iOS 7, you can ask Siri to open apps. Just say something like “Play Angry Birds” or “Open iPhoto.” You can even say ‘Take a picture.’ Although Siri won’t actually take the picture for you, she’ll just open the app for you.
Use Siri to turn Bluetooth and other settings like WiFi on and off simply by saying, “Turn Bluetooth/WiFi  Off/ On.”

ORGANIZATION

Tell Siri when and where you want to be reminded of something.

Schedule meetings. Say who, what, where, and when. Siri puts it on your calendar and sends an invitation to the person you’re meeting with via email.

In fact, Siri can write and send all of your emails or text messages or even organize for you to FaceTime with someone.

Use Siri to set the Alarm Clock for you.

Lastly, for Part one of All About Siri, we give you one of our favorite Siri features: What planes are above right now?

Stay tuned for Part Two so you’ll know how to use Siri to make your life more efficient!  Until then, here’s some Siri inspired humor, just for you guys.

Images courtesy of Hapshirecatteries.co.uk, Imgur.com & iPhoneAntidote.

iPhone Tip Of The Day Camera Edition

Got iOS 7? You special little kitten you! Wanna know a camera trick?

You can now focus photos on iOS 7 without tapping the screen with your finger!

Instead, focus the photo by holding down the volume button for a few seconds, like you would do on DSLRs and point-and-shoots.

Nice!

Image courtesy of thedailytouch.com & OMGcutethings.com

The fastest growing iOS game in History?