iStat Menus 6 Released for Mac With Notifications, Weather, Hotkeys, and Improved Customization

A major new version of iStat Menus, a popular Mac system monitor for power users, has been released today for macOS High Sierra.

One of the biggest new features in iStat Menus 6 is configurable notifications for a wide range of events, based on CPU, GPU, memory, storage disks, networking, sensors, battery, power, and weather.

iStat Menus now has a Notification Center widget for CPU usage, memory, top CPU and memory processes, load averages, disk space, and uptime.

You can be notified, for instance, when your public IP has changed, if your internet connection is down, if CPU usage is above 60 percent for more than 10 seconds, or even of daylight saving time changes.

iStat Menus 6 features an all-new weather menu with the current temperature and conditions, hourly and weekly forecasts, notifications, and more. Weather-related notifications can be configured.

The update also introduces new ways to color and style the menu bar icons, dropdown menus, and graphs, including light and dark backgrounds.

Another key feature is hotkeys support for opening and closing dropdown menus using your keyboard, including time, CPU, GPU, memory, storage disks, networking, sensors, battery, power, and more.

Other changes include improved accessibility, localization, AirPods battery level support, dropdown menu reordering, automatic fan set switching based on events, and many other new features outlined in the version history.

iStat Menus is built into the macOS menu bar, providing power users with convenient access to system information, such as CPU and GPU usage, memory stats, fan speeds, temperatures, disk usage, and battery life.

iStat Menus 6 is available now for $18 on developer Bjango’s website. Existing users with version 3.0 or later can upgrade for $9.99.

macOS High Sierra was publicly released on the Mac App Store today. iStat Menus 6 is also compatible with OS X El Capitan and macOS Sierra.

Tag: iStat Menus
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PSA: iPhone 8 Fast Charging Works With Third-Party USB-C Power Adapters That Support Power Delivery

A recent support document on Apple’s website confirms that you don’t need one of Apple’s USB-C power adapters to fast charge the latest iPhones.

Apple says the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, and presumably the iPhone X, can be fast charged with any comparable third-party USB-C power adapter that supports the USB Power Delivery specification.

An official Lightning to USB-C cable is still needed, and it’s not included with any iPhone. Apple charges $25 for a one meter cable, and $35 for a two meter cable, in the United States. There aren’t any MFi-certified alternatives yet.

Apple’s own USB-C power adapters that support USB-C Power Delivery include:

• 29W USB-C Power Adapter — $49
• 61W USB-C Power Adapter — $69
• 87W USB-C Power Adapter — $79

Aukey has a few cheaper third-party options available on Amazon:

• 29W USB-C Power Adapter — $22.99
• 46W USB-C Power Adapter — $39.99

Fast charging enables the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X to charge to 50 percent battery life in just 30 minutes.

Disclaimer: This article is not affiliated with Aukey, but MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon and may get paid if you click one of the above links and make a purchase.

Related Roundup: iPhone 8
Tags: USB-C, fast charging
Buyer’s Guide: iPhone (Buy Now)
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All the New Features in Apple’s Photos App in macOS High Sierra

Apple’s native Photos application got an update with the release of macOS High Sierra, including new library browsing features, a reorganized editing window, enhanced image recognition, and some additional tools to help make your photos look even better. Keep reading to find out what’s new in the Photos app.

Browsing the Photos Library

Apple has tweaked the main Library interface in Photos. Whereas previous versions of Photos let you use tabs along the top of the screen in place of an optional sidebar, Apple has now fully embraced the latter as the main navigation area, and has also added a draggable selection counter to the browser that you use to move or export batches of photos.

The new sidebar is divided into five sections: Library, Devices, Shared, Albums, and Projects. The Library section is where you can select from different browsing options, including Memories, Favorites, People, Places, and a useful new option called Imports, which organizes your photos based on when they were imported into your library.

The Shared section contains links to any shared albums you’ve created, while likes and comments appear in the Activity feed. The Albums section meanwhile contains two collapsible sub-sections called Media Types and My Albums. Media Types contains auto-generated views of your photos filtered by Selfies, Panoramas, Live Photos, and the like, while My Albums contains all the albums you have manually created. Lastly, Projects is where any books, cards, calendars, prints, or slideshows you’re working on appear.

The Editing Window

The Photos app also got a reorganized editing window in High Sierra. In addition to the sidebar, there’s now a toolbar along the top of the screen with three tabs that let you toggle through three different editing sidebars, making for a less cluttered interface all around. Notice too that the One-click Enhance option is now an icon at the top right of the screen, next to the Done button. 

The Crop tab corrals the traditional crop functions in the sidebar, while the Filters tab is home to an enhanced selection of image filter presets, each with three variations to choose from – Vivid, Dramatic, and Black and White.

Selecting the Adjust tab switches the sidebar to all the usual advanced editing tools, including two new ones, Curves and Selective Color. The triangle beside each tool allows you to expand it for more options, or collapse it to make room for others.

Live Photos

Apple has introduced additional tools for editing Live Photos, including the ability to manually select the static image that represents the clip. This is achieved by adjusting the slider at the bottom of the editing window and selecting Make Key Photo.

You can also now trim Live Photos, and even apply effects such as a Boomerang-like back-and-forth effect and an ethereal Long Exposure style, similar to when a shutter has been left open for a long time. The icons at the bottom left of the editing window let you mute the clip or turn off Live Photo entirely.

Third-Party Photo Editor Support

Lastly, Apple has enhanced the integration of its native Photos app with third-party apps, which should come as good news to those looking to broaden their editing options.

For example, it’s now possible to open a photo in a third-party app right from within your Photos Library. Not only that, any edits that you make within that third-party app are automatically saved back to your Photos library.

A number of popular third-party apps have already announced their support for Apple Photos, including Pixelmator Pro, Aurora HDR, Luminar, and Creative Kit. Several photo printers have also signed up, including Whitewall and Shutterfly. You can find more apps that support Photos by checking out the new dedicated section in the Mac App Store, which can also be accessed from within the Photos app.

Related Roundup: macOS High Sierra
Tag: Photos
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Amazon Drops Prices on 4K Content After Apple Offers 4K for HD Prices

With the release of the Apple TV 4K, Apple has started offering 4K content in its iTunes Store at HD prices, meaning the cost of a 4K movie maxes out at $19.99. Apple has also upgraded previously-purchased HD content to 4K at no additional cost to consumers.

In response, Amazon has started lowering the prices on 4K titles on its Amazon Video service. As Pocket-lint noticed, While prices could previously reach upwards of $30, 4K titles now range in price from $5 to $19.99. Amazon’s 4K library isn’t as large as Apple’s, but with 4K streaming becoming more prevalent, it should continue to grow.

Amazon’s video content will be available to watch on the Apple TV when Amazon releases its Amazon Prime Video app later this year. There’s currently no word on when the app might be released, but a rumor earlier today suggested it could launch this Thursday alongside NFL’s Thursday Night Football games.

Amazon is also rumored to be planning to release its own upgraded Fire TV set-top box with support for 4K and HDR in the near future.

Related Roundup: Apple TV
Tag: Amazon
Buyer’s Guide: Apple TV (Buy Now)
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Apple Collecting Browsing Data in Safari Using Differential Privacy in macOS High Sierra

With the release of macOS High Sierra, Apple is now collecting data from the Safari browser using differential privacy technology, reports TechCrunch. Apple is aiming to gain information about browsing habits to help identify problematic websites that use excessive power or too much memory.

This form of data collection is the first of its kind for Safari, aimed at identifying sites that use excessive power and crash the browser by monopolizing too much memory. Apple is also documenting the popularity of these problematic domains, in order to prioritize which sites it addresses first.

Apple first announced its adoption of differential privacy in 2016 alongside the debut of iOS 10. Differential privacy is a technique that allows Apple to collect user information while keeping user data entirely private. It uses hashing, subsampling, and noise injection to enable crowd-sourced learning without compromising user privacy.

Differential privacy is already in use on Mac and iOS devices for emoji use, search predictions, predictive text, and other small features that use machine learning for improvement.

Because of this, Apple does not have a specific message about the new Safari data collection when macOS High Sierra is installed, and it is lumped in with the general Mac analytics data notice that is presented when setting up a new Mac. From Apple’s Privacy notice regarding analytics:

If you agree to send Mac Analytics information to Apple, it may include the following:
– Details about app or system crashes, freezes or kernel panics.
– Information about events on your Mac (for example whether a certain function such as waking your Mac was successful or not).
– Usage information (for example, data about how you use Apple and third-party software, hardware, and services).

Analytics data contains your computer’s hardware and software specifications, including information about devices connected to your Mac and the versions of the operating system and apps you’re using on your Mac. Personal data is either not logged at all in the reports generated by your Mac, is subject to privacy preserving techniques such as differential privacy, or is removed from any reports before they’re sent to Apple.

While users are given the option to turn off analytics when setting up a Mac, there’s also a Security and Privacy setting that can be accessed to turn it off any time. To get to the feature, click on the Apple at the top of the menu bar, and choose “System Preferences.” From there, open up Security and Privacy, select the “Privacy” tab and then choose Analytics to choose whether or not to share data with Apple.

Tags: Safari, Differential privacy
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iPhone Users Complain of App Slowdowns and Performance Drops After Installing iOS 11

Following the release of a new version of iOS, there are typically complaints about battery problems, issues with apps, and minor bugs, and the launch of iOS 11 has proven to be no exception.

On reddit, numerous users who have installed iOS 11 claim to be experiencing much slower app performance, app crashes, and other similar issues. The initial reddit post calls launching apps “an absolute chore,” a sentiment echoed by dozens of additional comments.

Ever since I upgraded, launching apps is an absolute chore. Safari, Reddit, ESPN, Yahoo, texts, etc all have a terrible time opening. They either crash back to home, freeze and require closing the app or take well over a minute to load. I never had a single issue with my 7+ before last night and now suddenly it’s like this phone is stuck in quicksand. I’ve never had to hard reset this phone before but I’ve had to do it twice in the past two days.

Users are complaining that their phones “just get stuck on apps” and that a hard reset is the only way to fix the problem. Reddit, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Messenger, Safari, and more are all affected apps. Sometimes, apps refuse to open just launching from the Home screen, while at other times, apps launched from Notifications won’t work, and there are issues with Bluetooth.

I’ve been using the beta and it’s been super fine for me. But now on the GM I get all the same issues. Apps don’t launch, or if they finally do they crash. Things are freezing and crashing. Sometimes just bringing up CC stalls my phone and makes it unresponsive. Something in the update broke the Bluetooth controls connection and now I can’t use the skip button from my transmitter (which worked in the beta) to change songs.

The Now Playing widget in the Control Center is also a chief complaint, with multiple users unable to control songs on Spotify and Apple Music using the widget, and some users say their battery life has taken a serious hit since updating.

Not all customers who upgraded to iOS 11 are seeing these issues but based on the reddit thread, it seems a fair number of people are having problems. App updates and subsequent iOS 11 updates are likely to resolve these issues over time, but customers who want an immediate fix can try some of the methods reported to work on reddit

Some reddit users claim that resetting their settings (Settings –> General —> Reset –> Reset All Settings) fixed all of the app issues, while others have restored their devices and set it up as new to solve the problem. Others have backed up and restored and had better results. From one reddit user on backup and restore:

Exactly. I think people think this is a placebo effect but it really does work. Brought my 6S from a sluggish beast to more or less the same performance I had in iOS 10.

Multiple iPhone models appear to be affected, with redditors reporting issues on the iPhone 6s, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, and other earlier models. The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus do not appear to be affected, and there are few complaints about iPad Pro models.

Related Roundup: iOS 11
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Rider: Get ready for some flipping, hard-to-control action (Review)

The Google Play Store has games for any kind of gamer. Do you like lenghty games with a lot of content and a big storyline? There’s a huge amount of Final Fantasy games you can try, for example. Are you into car racing? RPGs? Tower defense? Shooters? There’s a vast list of games at your disposal. What if you like shorter, less involved game sessions while you commute or wait for your food to be ready? For you, there are games like Rider.

Developer: Ketchapp
Price: Free

Overview

We’re giving stuff away to help celebrate our tenth anniversary. Are you in?

Being such a simple game, there’s barely any setup or lenghty tutorials. The game immediately throws you into the action. You control a cool-looking bike through neon roads. This path is full of loops, steep slopes, chasms, and falling platforms. In order to accelerate your bike, you need to tap and hold anywhere on the screen.

Since there are a lot of ramps scattered throughout Rider’s levels, there’s the possibility of doing flips mid-air. Curiously, they are also done by tapping the screen and holding while mid-air. You don’t need to do it right away: you can start flipping quite literally mid-air. When you feel like you are overdoing it, just release your finger and the flipping stops. This is obviously not realistic at all, but you are controlling a driverless bike that is going through neon roads with moving platforms. What do you expect?

Needless to say, if you fall, crash, or execute an ill-fated flip and land upside down, it is game over for you. To track your progress, you get points as you go through the levels. You get additional points for each flip you perform successfully. The game will tell you that you are doing well with on-screen compliments a la Candy Crush Saga.

All levels have gems scattered around, and you also earn them just by going as far as you can. These gems are used for buying new bikes or vehicles in general, which, as far as I know, are purely aesthetic. The bikes that I have unlocked do not handle differently or anything. They just look cooler than the one you start with (although that one looks pretty cool as well).

In order to keep you playing, the game has several incentives that spice up an otherwise linear experience. If you launch the game X days in a row, then you get free gems. A particularly interesting idea is that you can do challenges while playing. These can be tasks such as doing a number of flips on a run, get a number of points, or similar. They are fun to do and, upon completion, they yield additional gems.

General Impressions

While the game can be fun, my main gripe with it is the control system. I am not the best gamer in the world, but the fact that the same control is used for accelerating and flipping has introduced additional frustrations. Sometimes I want to start accelerating before I touch ground so that I can continue with my momentum, but, since I’m still mid-air, the game thinks I want to flip. This has led to a lot of unintended deaths in otherwise enjoyable runs.

I thought that I would get better at the game as time went by, but that never happened. I understand that the developer wanted to make the controls as easy as possible, but sometimes it doesn’t quite work and you need a system a little bit more complex.

Other than that, the idea behind introducing challenges is very nice, since it provides a nice break from only trying to improve your high score. Also, the stage changes as you improve, so that the game is not as repetitive as I thought it would be at first. The developers understood the limitations of making an endless game, and tried their best to counteract them.

Finally, if you don’t like ads, but refuse to pay for their removal, then you’re going to have a hard time with Rider. Fortunately, the game does not have an ad banner while you are playing. However, as soon as you die, the game makes sure that its numerous ads are clearly visible. Sometimes you even get full-screen ads, which, in my opinion, are the most annoying concept of mobile gaming. You can remove them through an in-app purchase of approximately $2 if you want to keep your sanity.

Graphics

As I said previously, the graphics for this game are all made of neon outlines with very bright colors. They are nothing fancy or very detailed, but they get the job done. Also, the colors of the road and your vehicle change with each new run you play, in order to avoid falling into a monotonous situation.

Since there is no on-screen controls, the main screen is uncluttered and has barely any additional elements. I didn’t suffer any slowdowns or lockups either, thanks to the simpleness of the graphics. All of the bikes (and cars) I’ve earned are quite unique, so at least you have an incentive to get them all.

The screen that appears when you inevitably crash shows your current score, your high score, and a plethora of other elements, such as the bike shop, the gem store, the options screen, and similar. Also, it shows the amount of gems you currently hold and your progress in challenges. Since there’s nowhere else to put these elements, then everything has to go under this screen, which makes it look a little bit cluttered, especially after coming from the game’s clean interface.

Sound

The soundtrack of this game is composed of techno tracks that combine really well with the neon graphical elements. They are nothing to write home about, though, but, just as the graphics, they get the job done pretty well. Sound effects are present for several actions, such as getting gems, crashing, and pressing buttons. Also, your vehicle makes an engine sound when you are accelerating in an attempt to bring a little bit of realism.

Conclusion

Rider could me misinterpreted as another run-of-the-mill endless game, but it has a few elements that try to set it apart from other games in the genre. The daily rewards and challenges, although not new in the industry, are a nice way of keeping the game fresh and making you come back every day for a quick run.

However, I could never really get into the control system. Crashing because the game thinks that I want to flip when I really want to accelerate is no fun at all. Nevertheless, if you manage to get used to the overly simplistic nature of the controls, and if you like games where your main purpose is to improve your score, then Rider has more content than your average endless game.

Download and install Rider from the Google Play Store.

Chroma keying and layering comes to mobile video editing with Videoleap

Why it matters to you

Videoleap is promising more advanced video edits than previous apps have been able to offer.

Video-editing apps designed for mobile need to pare down the features in order to run on the smaller hardware — but Lightricks, the developer behind the photo apps Facetune, Enlight, and Enlight Quickshot says its new video app brings more desktop editing features to mobile than any other app. Today, September 25, Lightricks announced the launch of Videoleap, an iOS mobile video editor with several advanced tools.

Videoleap brings several features common in advanced desktop software into a mobile platform. A chroma key function allows video editors to remove solid colored backgrounds. Like the traditional chroma key technology, this feature removes the background so that it can be replaced with a different scene. Unlike chroma key, this feature doesn’t require a green screen but can use any solid-colored background. Artificial intelligence finds the edges of the subject, allowing for the background to be removed.

Layer functionality allows editors to overlap text, images, video, and effects for more precise editing. Blending and masking options allow users to superimpose videos, images, and text within those layers. Options for feathering and applying adjustments with brushes are also included.

The app also includes keyframe animations — a feature that allows users to create precise animations. Lightricks says that the tool allows users to control the position of the objects in each frame for more control over the final results.

The new video app also takes several nods from the company’s imaging apps. Videoleap contains similar color-adjustment capabilities as Enlight, the company says, with a similar workflow as well. While the app includes several more advanced features, the company says that the user interface is designed to keep the program easy to use.

“Nothing like Videoleap exists on the market – this is the first true video-editing app for mobile,” Zeev Farbman, co-founder and CEO of Lightricks, said in a press release. “Essentially, we are providing users with a mobile video production studio – yet we’ve simplified it for the mobile experience so that our users can make Hollywood-style edits in just a few minutes. Videoleap lets users cut down typical editing times on desktop from hours to minutes.”

Like Enlight Photofox and FaceTune 2, Videoleap is available in a free version or with more features as part of a subscription. The app is now available for download from the App Store.

Best iOS app deals of the day! 6 paid iPhone apps for free for a limited time

Everyone likes Apple apps, but sometimes the best ones are a bit expensive. Now and then, developers put paid apps on sale for free for a limited time, but you have to snatch them up while you have the chance. Here are the latest and greatest iOS app deals available from the iOS App Store.

These apps normally cost money and this sale lasts for a limited time only. If you go to the App Store and it says the app costs money, that means the deal has expired and you will be charged. 

ChainWise

Choose your favorite restaurants and then quickly find them nearby or in any city. ChainWise is perfect for traveling or just choosing a restaurant near home.

Available on:

iOS

Paintkeep

Get creative turning your photo to art instantly by choosing the watercolor or sketch filters you want. Paintkeep is suitable for both beginner and expert users to create unlimited possibilities of painting.

Available on:

iOS

Professor Ball

The ball in this addictive game is bouncing and seeking to escape from obstacles. You’ll have to help it escape in order to save the day and win the game.

Available on:

iOS

Universal Doctor Speaker

Universal Doctor Speaker is a multilingual app providing key medical phrases translated across 17 languages, with audios to facilitate communication between patients and healthcare professionals who don’t share a common language.

Available on:

iOS

Blue

Blue provides 36-hour weather forecasts relevant to your location in a fast and fun interface. Swipe up to see each hour represented in a beautiful gradient visual—whether in Fiji, or just at work.

Available on:

iOS

InstaWeb

InstaWeb is a powerful tool for iPhone and iPad that converts any website to PDF quickly and easily. It’s a must-have tool for students, teachers, and professional users who save online articles for offline reading.

Available on:

iOS

Driverless cars are getting new eyes from ex-Apple folks and Aeva

Why it matters to you

There are a great many sensors for self-driving cars already, but a new startup wants to create a device based on entirely different technology.

The most exciting innovation in vision these days has nothing to do with our eyes, but rather with our cars. In California’s Silicon Valley, two veterans of Apple’s Special Projects Group named Soroush Salehian and Mina Rezk have founded a startup known as Aeva, and their goal is to give eyes to self-driving cars. In essence, Aeva’s little device seeks to provide autonomous vehicles “a more complete, detailed, and reliable view of the world around them,” according to the New York Times, and it’s all dependent on lasers and sensors.

While there are plenty of sensors already on the market, including cameras, radar, GPS, and the all-important lidar, these individual devices sometimes have trouble communicating with one another. Aeva hopes to bridge the many gaps left by these disparate tools.

So what exactly does Aeva’s sensor do? The device is said to emit a continuous wave of light, instead of the individual pulses that current lidar sensors depend on. With this continuous wave, Aeva can better determine how this more complex signal is responding to (or really, bouncing off of) its external environment. That means Aeva can provide a far more detailed picture of its surroundings, while simultaneously tracking velocity. As the Times explained, “You can think of it as a cross between lidar, which is so good at measuring depth, and radar, which is so good at measuring speed.”

Rezk also told the publication that the continuous wave allows for greater range and resolution, and also better addresses weather conditions and highly reflective objects.

While Aeva isn’t intended to obviate the existing suite of sensors (having a greater number of these devices can help ensure safety), it could help improve the overall capabilities of self-driving cars.

When all is said and done, the idea of Aeva’s device and all the other sensors already available is to help cars be more strategic, and consequently safer. “With autonomous cars, 90 percent of the time, you are trying to infer what is happening,”  Tarin Ziyaee, co-founder and chief technology officer at the self-driving taxi startup Voyage, told the Times. “But what if you can just measure it?”