Satechi has launched this pretty cool charging dock for the Apple Watch that can be used without a cord. It has a USB-C port that is attached directly to the dock, allowing you to plug it directly into your iPad Pro or Mac devices and rest your Apple Watch right onto it.
I’m not sure if I’d use it attached to the iPad Pro like that, but on the Mac, hell yes! Long cords are so unnecessary and need to die.
Julia Alexander, writing for The Verge:
Early reviews for The Morning Show weren’t exactly positive, and executive producers Kerry Ehrin and Mimi Leder believe a lot of the feedback was an “attack on Apple.”
Both Leder and Ehrin felt like critics were reviewing Apple TV Plus as a service, and looping in The Morning Show with those critiques.
The Apple TV+ service launched with much hype and marketing around four shows — The Morning Show, For All Mankind, See, and Dickinson. I haven’t yet seen See or For All Mankind, but Dickinson and The Morning Show both look fabulous. I personally like watching The Morning Show, but that’s largely due to the star cast it has and the cinematography/direction, not because of its writing. I can see why the reviews were bad.
But to say that the reviews were an attack on Apple? Ha!
Mubi is a streaming service that is known for its sparse-but-meaningful catalog of films, has become available in India, reports Manish Singh for Techcrunch.
The London-headquartered firm is offering a three-month subscription in India at Rs 199 ($2.8), after which it would charge $7 a month or $67 a year (this way, the monthly cost works out to about $5.5). This is substantially lower than the £9.99 monthly subscription fee it charges to subscribers in the U.K., and the $10.99 it charges in the U.S.
I first learned about Mubi through a comment on some random Reddit thread. Mubi has made a name for itself by curating a small collection of critically acclaimed films in its catalog — a catalog that refreshes every few weeks.
I’ve been wanting to try out Mubi for a while now, but never really pushed the lever owing to its high subscription price. Now that it has arrived in India with a low entry barrier (and it also has a nice app for Apple TV), I might just take the plunge.
I updated my Apple Watch Series 4 (GPS) to watchOS 6 a couple of days ago and while it’s nice to have features like the ECG app in India or the new independent apps, by far my favorite thing in watchOS 6 is the new California watch face on watchOS 6 with Devanagari numerals. I have it set to show the StepsApp complication, and I love how minimal the whole thing looks.
How I wish I could display the day and date in Devanagari too.
Update: To learn how to enable Devanagari numbers on Apple Watch, follow this tutorial.
Matt Mullenweg, writing on his personal blog about Automattic’s latest Series D round from Salesforce Ventures at a $3 billion valuation.
For Automattic, the funding will allow us to accelerate our roadmap (perhaps by double) and scale up our existing products—including WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and (in a few days when it closes) Tumblr. It will also allow us to increase investing our time and energy into the future of the open source WordPress and Gutenberg.
Automattic has long been one of my most revered companies on the internet. The way WordPress has evolved over the years, complimented by products like Jetpack and VaultPress, it truly remarkable.
And so, I’ve been very excited to see what the Automattic team does with its Tumblr acquisition. Tumblr was known to have phenomenal potential back in the day, and with the right team running it now, I long to see where the product goes. At the bare minimum, I hope Tumblr can act as an alternative or replacement to Instagram, which Facebook has already ruined with too many ads.
Pankaj D
“Apple will be investing $1 billion in India through its partners. They have said the production will be used for meeting the demand for its products across global markets,” an official source told TOI.
Foxconn, Taiwan’s contract manufacturing behemoth and the biggest production partner for Apple globally, will be investment partner for the iPhone maker’s latest push. Its factory in Chennai will be used to manufacture products for Apple’s global markets. Also, a host of component suppliers to the company will be making investments in the region for the local push.
Good to see these activities in recent times, although I’d like to see some concrete results from all this.
Apple has posted a new job listing on its ‘Jobs at Apple’ website for a Environmental Initiatives Program Manager focused on India and the Middle East.
The main focus of this position is on tracking, monitoring and implementation of environmental regulations in India and the Middle East, establishing relationships to key internal and external partners, and identifying and developing leadership opportunities for Apple in the field of environmental responsibility.
The position is located at Apple India’s offices in Gurugram, India and has a long list of key qualifications.
Zack Whittaker, reports for TechCrunch how Facebook, through its banned Research app, was able to obtain the personal and sensitive device data of about 187,000 users.
He writes:
The social media giant said in a letter to Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s office — which TechCrunch obtained — that it collected data on 31,000 users in the U.S., including 4,300 teenagers. The rest of the collected data came from users in India.
Read that carefully. Of the 187,000 users that Facebook snooped data from, (only) 31,000 were from the U.S. The rest of the users were from India, which makes it about 156,000 users. According to the letter obtained by TechCrunch, a whopping 34,000 users were between the ages of 13 and 17, of which 4,300 were from the US, which means close to a whopping 30,000 users from India whose data Facebook was snoop ing on were underage.
These “research” apps relied on willing participants to download the app from outside the app store and use the Apple-issued developer certificates to install the apps. Then, the apps would install a root network certificate, allowing the app to collect all the data out of the device — like web browsing histories, encrypted messages and mobile app activity — potentially also including data from their friends — for competitive analysis.
The fact that Facebook collected data from over 1.5 Lakh Indian users, of which close to 30,000 users were between 13 and 17 years of age, is truly mind-boggling.
