Tech Mania

Apple adds camera effects like stickers, filters, and Memoji to messages

Apple adds camera effects like stickers, filters, and Memoji to messages

Apple is invading Snapchat’s territory with new effects that let you embellish what you shoot through the Messages camera. Today at WWDC, Ap...

Apple’s Memoji brings an animated you to your iPhone

<a class="crunchbase-link" data-entity="apple" data-type="organization" href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/apple/" target="_blank">Apple</a> showcased a big update to Animojis today, adding a human look called Memoji alongside tongue detection on the silly iPhone X animals.
The company’s Animoji feature was one of the big highlights of the iPhone X reveal in September. The goofy cartoon pigs and chickens utilized the phone’s new front-facing camera array to track a user’s face and deliver recorded messages in a fun way.
Since the initial launch, the company has added a few more characters to the animated repertoire, today is the first big change in how they look and operate.
<img alt="" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1650787" height="325" src="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/memoji_process-wwdc.jpg?w=680" width="680" />
The company announced today it was adding ghost, koala, tiger and t-rex Animojis (with tongue tracking!), but more interestingly the company added Memoji, a custom Animoji tool which allows users to build their own.
It’s set up a lot like Bitmoji but takes the magic of Animoji live face-tracking to deliver some very fun and diverse experiences that can live in messages or can be directly transposed on your face through the camera app.
<img alt="" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1650798" height="453" src="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/0304.jpg?w=680" width="680" />
 
 
from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2kLmhCx

Apple’s Memoji brings an animated you to your iPhone

Apple showcased a big update to Animojis today, adding a human look called Memoji alongside tongue detection on the silly iPhone X animals....

Apple says CarPlay will now support third party navigation and mapping apps

Big news for CarPlay, Apple’s in-car service that lets a vehicle’s display act as a controller and ‘reader’ of your iPhone: at WWCD, Apple today announced that it will now let third-party navigation and mapping apps to work with the service starting with iOS 12. Up to now, Apple only allowed its own mapping app, Maps, to work over CarPlay, but now you can use Waze, Google Maps, Here, or whatever other app you might want to use to get from A to B.
The change marks a big shift for Apple, which is well known for favoring its own native apps and generally a more tightly controlled ecosystem on iOS and across devices. But Maps hasn’t been the most popular mapping app by some measure, even for users of iOS. This is in a sense is a tacit acknowledgement that iPhone owners are using a wide variety of other services, and so to get CarPlay used more, this needed to be enabled.
Apple says that most major vehicle manufacturers are partnering with Apple to incorporate CarPlay, which gives iPhone users in-car access to its phone services, Apple Music, iMessage, Apple Books (new name!) and podcasts, along with a selection of third-party apps like Spotify, Google Play Music, NPR and iHeartRadio, as well as Siri support.
It’s not clear why Apple didn’t extend third-party support for other mapping and navigation apps until now. Perhaps it was to sweeten the deal for more people to use its own Maps app.
It’s not clear how many users there are of CarPlay, nor how many cars are now equipped to work with it, but the hope, it seems, is that with increased usefulness, now the service will see more adoption.
 
 
from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2xKc2I4

Apple says CarPlay will now support third party navigation and mapping apps

Big news for CarPlay, Apple’s in-car service that lets a vehicle’s display act as a controller and ‘reader’ of your iPhone: at WWCD, Apple t...

With iOS 12, Apple focuses on performance

<a class="crunchbase-link" data-entity="apple" data-type="organization" href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/apple/" target="_blank">Apple’s Craig</a> Federighi announced that Apple was doubling down on performance with the upcoming release of iOS 12 at the WWDC event in San Jose, CA today.
What’s more, he said, the company would be making these changes to the full range of iOS devices going back to 2013. “And so for iOS 12, we are doubling down on performance from top to bottom making improvements to make.your device faster and more responsive. And because we want these changes to be available the full range of our customers, iOS 12 will be available on all the same devices as iOS 11,” Federighi told the WWDC audience.
<img alt="" class="size-large wp-image-1650739 aligncenter" height="369" src="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/ios_devices.jpg?w=680" width="680" />
Perhaps because customers were unhappy to learn about the <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/28/apple-apologizes-for-not-being-clearer-about-slowing-down-iphones-with-older-batteries/">battery issues with older iOS devices</a> Federighi stressed that Apple has focussed these performance increases on older devices, giving people with older iPhones, the maximum lift. Using the iPhone 6 as an example, he gave some figures about performance increase, stressing that it was still early days. (As an iPhone 6 user, I was listening carefully.)
“Now on that device, iOS delivers a number of improvements. Across common operations you’ll see that apps launch up to 40% faster, the keyboard can come up to 50% faster and you can slide to take a photo at up to 70% faster,” he said.
But he said, the biggest focus, and one all iPhone users can appreciate, is that they are working to optimize performance when it’s under load. As Federighi said that’s when you need performance the most and where iOS 12 really shines.
“We put iOS 12 through our stress tests and we saw in those conditions share sheet coming up twice as fast, and apps launching twice as fast. These are big, big improvements,” he stressed.
Lastly, Apple also optimized iOS 12 at the chip level working with the chip team to optimize performance, while taking battery life into account. If you keep the power pedal to the medal for too long, you suck battery, but Apple is trying to find that perfect balance of power and battery life in iOS 12.
“CPUs traditionally respond to an increased demand for performance by slowly ramping up their clock speed. Well, now in iOS 12, we’re much smarter. When we detect that you need a performance lift when you’re scrolling and launching an app, we ramped up processor performance instantly to its highest state delivering high performance and a ramp it down just as fast to preserve battery life,” he said.
All of this will be available when iOS 12 is released later this year.
 
 
from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2suxeww

With iOS 12, Apple focuses on performance

Apple’s Craig Federighi announced that Apple was doubling down on performance with the upcoming release of iOS 12 at the WWDC event in San ...

Apple delivers big updates to its augmented reality platform

<a class="crunchbase-link" data-entity="apple" data-type="organization" href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/apple/" target="_blank">Apple</a> began WWDC talking all about the update it’s delivering to its augmented reality platform, introducing ARKit 2 with iOS 12 which brings several big tech upgrades.
The company didn’t get a chance to showcase all of the things it’s adding to ARKit, but did touch on the big additions, which include improved face tracking, realistic rendering, 3D object detection, persistent experiences and shared experiences.
Apple released ARKit one year ago. The developer platform is based on technology which synthesized the relationship between the inertial sensors of Apple devices and their cameras to track their position in space. This positional tracking allows users to not only move around digital objects but fix those objects to physical places in an environment.
At Google I/O, we saw a new technology called Cloud Anchors which matches up what a pair of smartphone users are seeing in the cloud to allow for multiplayer, it’s not clear how Apple is doing this, but  what’s interesting about Google’s approach is that Cloud Anchors allows for multiplayer across platforms so Android and iOS users can pair up easily as well.
 
 
from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2LlSGuI

Apple delivers big updates to its augmented reality platform

Apple began WWDC talking all about the update it’s delivering to its augmented reality platform, introducing ARKit 2 with iOS 12 which brin...

App Store hits 20M registered developers and $100B in revenues, 500M visitors per week

Microsoft may have just acquired developer’s favorite code respository GitHub, but it is Apple where many of them are making a lot of money at the moment. Today at WWDC, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook announced that there are now 20 million registered developers on iOS, and collectively they have made about $100 billion in revenues, with the App Store bringing in some 500 million visitors per week.
“We’re also happy to announce that this week we’re going to achieve another huge milestone,” Cook said in his presentation. “The money that developers have earned through the App Store will top $100 billion.”
The figures underscore how Apple’s attention has continued to swing more firmly into its developer ecosystem and app marketplace, which is becoming a stronger engine of revenue generation as overall smartphone purchasing slows down in more saturated markets.
He also said that Swift, the programming language Apple developed and uses for its apps, is also picking up some strong momentum.
“It’s the fastest growing programming language out there,” he said. “Apple developers are using it in huge numbers, in fact over 350,000 apps have been written in Swift in the app store. We believe that coding is an essential skill and believe it should be offered by every school in the world. Learning to code has so many benefits, it developers problem solving, critical thinking skills.”
 
 
 
from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2LiZWYi

App Store hits 20M registered developers and $100B in revenues, 500M visitors per week

Microsoft may have just acquired developer’s favorite code respository GitHub, but it is Apple where many of them are making a lot of money ...

Apple introduces iOS 12

<a class="crunchbase-link" data-entity="apple" data-type="organization" href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/apple/" target="_blank">Apple</a> announced the next version of iOS at <a href="https://techcrunch.com/tag/wwdc-2018/">its WWDC developer conference</a>. While iOS 12 won’t be available before the fall, it’s always interesting to get a sneak peek at the next version of iOS.
Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi first talked about some numbers. 81 percent of iOS users are currently running iOS 11. 6 percent of Android users are currently on the last version.
“For iOS 12, we’re doubling down on performance,” Federighi said. iOS 12 is going to be available on all devices that currently support iOS 11.
It’s interesting the Federighi talked about iOS 12 on the iPhone 6 Plus. Apps launch 40 percent faster, the keyboard comes up 50 percent faster and opening the camera is 70 percent faster.
You get the idea, the big new feature of iOS 12 is performance and optimization.
But it doesn’t mean that Apple didn’t think about new features. Apple has created a new file format for augmented reality called USDZ. Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis talked for a couple of minutes to announce that Adobe apps are going to support USDZ.
Apple is launching a new app to educate people about augmented reality. This app is called Measure and works pretty much like popular third-party app <a href="https://measurekit.com">MeasureKit</a>.
This is a developing post, please refresh for updates.
 
 
from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2sxGUX9

Apple introduces iOS 12

Apple announced the next version of iOS at its WWDC developer conference . While iOS 12 won’t be available before the fall, it’s always int...