Apple Plans Three New iPhones for 2018

Mark Gurman and Debby Wu, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is preparing to release a trio of new smartphones later this year: the largest iPhone ever, an upgraded handset the same size as the current iPhone X and a less expensive model with some of the flagship phone’s key features.

The most interesting bit about this report is this:

In at least some regions, Apple is considering offering a dual-SIM card option for the larger model. That would let people use their phones in countries with different carrier plans without having to swap out cards. Such a feature has been growing in importance and popularity, especially in Europe and Asia where business people routinely visit multiple countries.

Could we finally see a dual-SIM version of the iPhone? I’d be bummed if this option was exclusive to the largest (read: most expensive) iPhone though.

February 27, 2018 ✚ Permalink

Apple Watch and Baby Apps with WatchKit

Marco Arment comments on the terrible state of WatchKit:

Developing Apple Watch apps is extremely frustrating and limited for one big reason: unlike on iOS, Apple doesn’t give app developers access to the same watchOS frameworks that they use on Apple Watch.

Instead, we’re only allowed to use WatchKit, a baby UI framework that would’ve seemed rudimentary to developers even in the 1990s. But unlike the iPhone’s web apps, WatchKit doesn’t appear to be a stopgap — it seems to be Apple’s long-term solution to third-party app development on the Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch may be the best selling smartwatch out there without any competition, but it still has tremendous potential that 3rd party developers aren’t able to make full use of.

February 27, 2018 ✚ Permalink

Cloudflare Announces its 123rd Data Center in Kathmandu, Nepal

Martin J Levy, writing on the Cloudflare blog:

We are especially excited to announce our Kathmandu data center while attending APRICOT conference, being held in Nepal this year. The event, supported by APNIC, the local Regional Internet address Registry (RIR) for the Asia-Pacific region, attracts leaders from Internet industry technical, operational, and policy-making communities. Cloudflare’s favorite part of APRICOT is the Peering Forum track on Monday.

Come for the announcement, stay for the flag dimensions’ nerdy.

February 23, 2018 ✚ Permalink

Google’s Tez App Gets Support for Bill Payments in India

Diana Layfield, VP, Payments & Commerce, Next Billion Users at Google, writes on the Official Google India Blog:

We’ll start with support for more than 80 billers, including national and state electricity providers, gas and water, and DTH recharge. These include billers like Reliance Energy, BSES and DishTV, and in total will cover all states and major metros in India. Tez also supports Bharat BillPay system, which lets you fetch the latest bill from your providers.

Competition is always good.

February 19, 2018 ✚ Permalink

Black Panther Claims the 5th Highest Opening Weekend at the Box Office

Black Panther had a worldwide release this past Friday and the film, which has been getting incredible reviews from everywhere, has now gone into the history books with the 5th highest opening weekend at the box office.

Also notice how 8 out of the Top 10 films listed on the page as from the same studio. Guess which one?

February 19, 2018 ✚ Permalink

Picking Apart the Crashing iOS String

Manish Goregaonkar has published this absolutely fascinating analysis of the iOS crashing bug that occurs when it comes across a particular text string.

So there’s yet another iOS text crash, where just looking at a particular string crashes iOS. Basically, if you put this string in any system text box (and other places), it crashes that process. I’ve been testing it by copy-pasting characters into Spotlight so I don’t end up crashing my browser.

[…]

I was pretty interested in what made this sequence “special”, and started investigating.

Even if you are not interested in the technical details, I urge you to go read it. The explanation about Indic scripts is incredibly interesting read.

February 16, 2018 ✚ Permalink

Chrome Will Start Labeling All HTTP Websites as ‘Not Secure’ Starting July 2018

Emily Schechter, Chrome Security Product Manager writing on the Chromium Blog:

For the past several years, we’ve moved toward a more secure web by strongly advocating that sites adopt HTTPS encryption. And within the last year, we’ve also helped users understand that HTTP sites are not secure by gradually marking a larger subset of HTTP pages as “not secure”. Beginning in July 2018 with the release of Chrome 68, Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure”.

This is fantastic, and I whole-heartedly welcome this move.

If you have a website, there’s no real reason why you’re still not using https. Services like Let’s Encrypt make it super easy to do so, and if your host doesn’t support them (or any alternative) yet, it’s time to move.

At the very least, go sign up for CloudFlare and start using the Free SSL option.

February 9, 2018 ✚ Permalink