Month: June 2018

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SAN JOSE—Apple detailed its next major operating system update at its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote today: macOS 10.14, which the company has named "Mojave," sticking with its California-based naming convention. Tim Cook told the audience that MacOS included a lot of new features for both everyday and pro users, and Craig Federighi kicked off the demo with something that will likely be near and dear to many Ars readers' hearts: dark mode.

Dark mode!

Night-owls and others who prefer a light-on-dark appearance can now take advantage of an official dark theme for the entire OS. Previously macOS allowed turning the menubar and dock dark, but this new preference appears to apply more extensively throughout the operating system. The new dark system theme matches well with a matching one for XCode, enabling developers to bathe their development environment in cooler dark colors.

Desktop help

Federighi showed off a live desktop wallpaper updating function that changes your wallpaper throughout the day, but far more interesting was the "desktop stacks" feature, which allows you to organize icons on the desktop into piles, rather than having them spread across the entire desktop willy-nilly. On activating the option, files on your desktop are auto-arranged into stacks based on selectable criteria, such as document kind, date, or by tag.

(credit: Valentina Palladino)

SAN JOSE—Apple announced tvOS updates on the WWDC stage, though the company didn't confirm whether these features amount to a whole new version number. No huge changes mark the latest version of tvOS, but Apple did include support for Dolby Atmos surround sound, a feature that many pointed out as a missed opportunity in the Apple TV 4K.

The Apple TV 4K came out at the end of last year, and it represented a pretty big update to the streaming device since competitors like Roku added 4K support to their devices already. While it supported Dolby Vision HDR, the device did not support Dolby Atmos surround sound at launch. Apple's next tvOS update will bring that feature to its set-top boxes, essentially allowing streamed content to produce richer sound experiences than they did before.

Existing iTunes purchases will receive Atmos sound-channel upgrades for free, Apple confirmed during the WWDC keynote. The company did not confirm whether similar support will come to older Apple TV devices.

Apple is announcing watchOS 5, a major update to its smartwatch platform.

There's a big focus on new fitness and health features. You can now challenge any of your friends to a seven-day exercise competition, which will compare your tracking stats to your friends'. The winner will get an award to add to their collection, kind of like real life achievement system. There are also new workout types like yoga and hiking. Outdoor running can now track your rolling mile pace—how fast you ran for the last mile—and will alert you if you're falling behind your desired pace.  If you forget to start workout detection at the beginning of your workout, watchOS' new automatic workout detection can retroactively credit you with workout time. It can also give you a heads up if you forget to stop the activity tracking.

Enlarge (credit: Lisa Brewster / Flickr)

A recent hack of ticket-distribution website Ticketfly exposed more than 26 million email addresses, along with home addresses, phone numbers, and first and last names, according to the Have I Been Pwned breach notification service. The intrusion provides the latest reminder that users should provide incorrect or incomplete information to online services whenever possible. More about that later.

The breach was first reported last week by Motherboard, which said the breach was carried out by a hacker who had first offered to provide Ticketfly officials with details of the underlying vulnerability in exchange for one bitcoin, worth roughly $7,500. When the officials didn’t respond, the hacker defaced the site and published the user data online, Motherboard said.

Have I Been Pwned said over the weekend that the data included 26.1 million unique email addresses, names, physical addresses, and phone numbers. It didn’t include password or credit card data. In a blog post, Ticketfly officials said they were in the process of bringing the ticket service back online. Part of that effort involves working with forensic and security experts to investigate the hack and to better secure the new site against similar intrusions.

Asus

After the Razer phone, Sony Xperia Play, and I guess the Nokia N-Gage, someone is trying to make a gaming smartphone again. This time it's Asus, which has tapped its PC gaming sub-brand, "Republic of Gamers," to create the Asus ROG phone.

The phone is still made out of the usual high-end smartphone parts, with a Snapdragon 845, with 8GB of RAM, 128GB or 512GB of storage, and a generous 4,000mAh battery. Asus says the Snapdragon 845 is the "world's fastest," thanks to "speed-binned" parts and a "GameCool vapor-chamber cooling" system. By grabbing only the best parts and extra cooling, Asus has been able to give the SoC a moderate clock increase from the usual 2.7GHz to 2.96GHz. The display is a six-inch, 2160×1080 AMOLED with HDR support. Rather than the usual 60Hz refresh rate, this OLED panel goes up to 90Hz. That won't quite match the refresh speeds of Razor's 120Hz LCD, but it's something.

(credit: Valentina Palladino)

SAN JOSE—iOS 12 is coming to iPhones and iPads later this year, and as expected, it primarily focuses on performance and stability, with a few new features. The new software was announced during a keynote presentation at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), as expected.

Apple says the update will be available on all the same devices as the current iOS 11 release, and that the company is putting a particular focus on ensuring the update works smoothly on older devices such as the iPhone 6 family.

To give a point of reference, Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said iOS 12 will launch apps up to 40% faster and bring up the keyboard up to 50% faster on an iPhone 6 Plus. Federighi said the update will make a compatible phone "instantly ramp up performance to its highest state" when it recognizes that it needs a performance boost—such as when you're loading an app—then more quickly bring it down to help preserve battery life.