Apple Continues to Tweak Emojis in Latest iOS 8.3 Beta [iOS Blog]

After introducing all new emoji with skin tone modifiers in iOS 8.3 beta 2, Apple continues to make minor tweaks to the emoji library in subsequent beta releases. The latest iOS 8.3 beta 4 released through Apple’s public beta testing program on Tuesday now separates default emoji from modified ones when holding them down on the keyboard, and each emoji skin tone now has a matching hair color.

The emoji keyboard also shows the Recently Added view as default again, making it easier to select from the emojis that you use most often for messaging. iOS 8.3 beta 4 also gains iMessage filtering that separates messages sent from unknown senders, removes the beta label from iCloud Photo Library and includes a number of bug fixes outlined within the MacRumors discussion forums.

We’ve been tracking all of the iOS 8.3 changes in our iOS 8 Features Roundup.

HP Partnership With Apple’s Beats Officially Ends as HP Moves on to Bang & Olufsen

When Apple acquired Beats Electronics, several companies that had deals and partnerships with the headphone company were forced to sever their agreements, including Hewlett-Packard (HP).

At the time of the acquisition, HP was selling laptops with “Beats Audio” branded speakers, through a partnership with Beats that was originally established in 2011. HP was only allowed to continue development on products using Beats Audio technologies through the end of 2014, leaving the company without an audio partner and without the “cool” factor Beats brought to the partnership.

Ahead of the end of its partnership with Beats, HP began using its own in-house audio solution and ceased using Beats branding and logos, but it was unclear if that solution was based on Beats audio technology, as suggested by PCWorld.

At the launch of the recent HP Spectre X360 last month, an HP executive declined to tell the IDG News Service whether the homegrown technology was influenced by Beats, or if it had Beats amplifiers in them. HP has excellent in-house technology to boost audio in PCs, said Mike Nash, vice president of product management for consumer personal systems, at the time.

Though there may have been some remaining ties to Beats in HP products, HP today signaled its readiness to move on from the Beats brand by inking a deal with a new audio partner — Bang & Olufsen.

HP will use Bang & Olufsen audio technology in its PCs, tablets, and other accessories, with “custom tuned” audio for different PC models. Beginning this spring, HP PCs with Bang & Olufsen branding will start shipping to consumers. Like it did with its Beats partnership, HP will add Bang & Olufsen stickers and logos to the PCs, highlighting the new audio technology. CNET shared HP’s thoughts on the new partnership.

“We’ve certainly spent a lot of time working on audio with Beats over the years. I think certainly a lot of learnings both ways in that relationship,” Mike Nash, an HP personal-computer and printing vice president, said on a call with reporters Tuesday, soon after the deal was announced. “The opportunity now is to take everything we already know and combine that with some new expertise … as part of our partnership with Bang & Olufsen.”

Even as HP moves on to Bang & Olufsen, the company is permitted to continue to sell its remaining stock of Beats-branded laptops through the end of 2015, so Bang & Olufsen-branded HP products may sit on store shelves beside those with Beats Audio technology.

Apple Acquires ‘Rock-Solid High-Performance’ Database Company FoundationDB

Apple has acquired database company FoundationDB, reports TechCrunch. FoundationDB is a company that “develops scalable and fault tolerant databases that support multiple data models.” A notice on the company’s site says that it has ceased to offer downloads after deciding to “evolve [the] company mission.”

According to TechCrunch, FoundationDB may have been an attractive purchase for Apple due to its ability to handle ACID-compliant transactions (aka data transfers) quickly and its strong scalability. A company blog post suggested it could achieve 54 billion writes per hour at a cost-per-write of 3 nano dollars.

FoundationDB’s attractiveness came in the speed at which it handled ACID-compliant transactions and coupled that with strong scalability. FoundationDB hosted a booth at TechCrunch Disrupt 2012, where we first wrote about its approach to a modern NoSQL database and its ‘NoSQL, YesACID’ motto. FoundationDB’s latest engine, which was covered by TC Columnist Jon Evans late last year, scaled up 14.4 million random writes per second.

TechCrunch describes FoundationDB as a “fast, affordable and durable database company” that may have been acquired to boost Apple’s server-side technologies for the App Store, iTunes Connect, iTunes in the Cloud, or another service.

Apple confirmed the acquisition with the standard statement that it gives on purchases: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

Video Review: Element Case’s Solace Case for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus [iOS Blog]

Element Case is a company known for making cases from premium materials, often with a premium price tag. We went hands-on with the company’s Solace case for the iPhone 6 Plus in our latest video review, which is part of Element Case’s LUXE Collection.

Priced at $99, the Solace is a three-piece case that consists of a polycarbonate body with a foam insert to protect the iPhone, an aluminum top and bottom, and aluminum buttons. It comes in several colors, including gold, white, black, and turquoise.

We thought the Solace offered good protection, but it adds a decent amount of bulk and it’s pretty pricy for what you’re getting comparative to other cases.

Both the Solace case for iPhone 6 and and the case for the iPhone 6 Plus are available from the ElementCase website for $99.

Note: MacRumors received no compensation for this video review.

Apple Seeds Fourth iOS 8.3 Beta to Developers

Apple today seeded the fourth beta of iOS 8.3 to developers, nearly two weeks after seeding the third iOS 8.3 beta and more than a month and a half after releasing the first iOS 8.3 beta.

The beta, build 12F5061, is available as an over-the-air download and through the iOS Developer Center. Apple has also released Xcode 6.3 beta 4.

Previous iOS 8.3 betas have included features like a new emoji picker and all new diversified emoji and skin tone modifiers, new country flag emoji and updated emoji icons to represent the iPhone, iMac, and Apple Watch.

Along with those emoji changes, iOS 8.3 brings wireless CarPlay connectivity, support for Google 2-step verification, Apple Pay for the China UnionPay network, and several new Siri languages.

Third-Party Mac Developers Begin Embracing Force Touch, Led by ‘Inklet’

Following its March 9 media event where it introduced “Force Touch” trackpad technology for the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro and upcoming 12-inch MacBook, Apple opened up the feature to third-party developers by delivering developer APIs starting with the third beta of OS X 10.10.3. The APIs will allow developers to support the ability of Force Touch trackpads to sense multiple levels of pressure and perform different actions depending on how hard the trackpad is being pressed.

Apple has already taken steps to build Force Touch support into its own apps, as outlined in a support document. At the simplest level, the new Force Touch trackpads support a new “Force click” functionality, which allows a user to click on an item and then press a bit harder to activate a secondary function such as pulling up Dictionary or Wikipedia entires on selected text in Mail or Safari, a map preview when selecting an address, or Quick Look previews of files when selecting icons.

Beyond the single-level Force click, the new Force Touch trackpad also supports more advanced features through sensing multiple levels of pressure, allowing users to accelerate zooming in and out of maps or vary the speed of fast forward and rewind in QuickTime and iMovie. iMovie also supports “bumpy pixels” in which the trackpad gives subtle vibrational feedback during the editing process to let the user know when the end of a dragged clip has been reached or when cropped clips are in proper alignment.

While Force Touch is currently limited to the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, the feature looks set to expand throughout Apple’s product lineups, with the company’s other notebooks gaining the technology as update cycles allow and the Apple Watch supporting it as a key interface mechanism at launch. Apple is also rumored to be bringing Force Touch to the iPhone later this year.

On the Mac side, Ten One Design today announced an update to Inklet, its popular third-party drawing software, that will bring “enhanced pressure control” to MacBooks with the new Force Touch trackpad. The company believes it is the first Mac developer to launch support for Force Touch.

Through Inklet’s software, users have been able to draw and edit images within applications like Pixelmator and Photoshop for a while, by determining “stylus pressure” to differentiate between when to use thin and thick lines. Ten One Design notes that the introduction of the Force Touch trackpad makes its app not only more precise in designating pressure sensitivities, but more reliable as well.

We think Inklet is the first 3rd party application to support the Apple’s new Force Touch trackpads. This means you’ll have amazing pressure control on newer machines, and in a pinch you can even use your finger.

Having a trackpad capable of measuring force is a big deal. Even though Inklet has always been capable of determining stylus pressure, this update makes measuring pressure simpler and more reliable. Kudos to the team at Apple who designed this precise and useful instrument.

Beyond Force Touch support, Inklet’s update also bring “improved pressure response” to MacBooks with the traditional multi-touch trackpad, along with the usual minor bug fixes. The company says Inklet will prompt users to update the app “sometime within the next three days”, although users wanting to check out the new features sooner can hasten the process with the “Check for Updates” prompt in the Inklet menu.

Those yet to download the software can do so for $24.95 for the base app, or $34.90 for the app bundled with the company’s Pogo stylus, from Inklet’s official website.

Apple Adds New Apple TV Channels TED, Tastemade and Young Hollywood

Apple on Tuesday added three new TV channels to the Apple TV set-top box in the United States: TED, Tastemade and Young Hollywood. The three new channels bring non-profit TED Talks and a wide selection of premium food, travel and celebrity programming to the Apple TV and should be available beginning today. The new channels arrive just over three months after the additions of UFC, The Scene, Fusion and Daily Motion.

TED Talks given by the non-profit organization are hosted by guest speakers that cover a wide range of influential topics, including science, religion, technology, education and more. Meanwhile, Tastemade provides hundreds of episodes of premium food and travel programming, and Young Hollywood delivers the latest celebrity-related programming including entertainment news and exclusive interviews.

Route Tracking and Screen Mirroring Shown in New Apple Patent [iOS Blog]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today released a patent application filed by Apple back in January of 2013, describing a method by which an iPhone or iPad can provide specifically detailed GPS path information to another device after given proper authorization (via AppleInsider).

In the vein of Find My Friends, which allows rudimentary static location-based tracking services and slightly more in-depth parental controls, today’s patent application would add another level of detail to the service. The patent suggests providing location- and path-based information accumulated by one device in the visual form of a digital route on a second device following the first.

Because the device receiving the information would be constantly updated with the first device’s movements, it would allow users to follow someone in real time. The patent even mentions the receiving device could generate “spoken word directions”, so if a user is driving a car, they wouldn’t have to constantly be staring at the phone’s screen.

A device in motion can record data about the path it travels and send the path data to another device. A user of the second device can then use the data to see where the first user traveled and/or travel the same path as did the first user.

For example, while the first user is driving a car, she could be running a maps application on the first device, and share the path she is travelling with the user of the second device while the second user is also driving a car. The second device could then display the path in an instance of the maps application running on the second device, or the second device could display directions the second user could use to follow the first user, or the second device could generate spoken word directions the second user could use to follow the first user, all in real time.

The patent mentions that while the program would be able to run on “a mobile communications network (e.g., 3G, LTE, WiMAX, etc.), a wireless LAN (e.g., 802.11), or another kind of wireless network”, sometimes an intermediary, like iCloud, may be used as well. There’s even a mode that could ignore the path sharing altogether, allowing the first device to share directions to a specific location to the second device, automatically generating a route that may be quicker than following the first device.

Also of note is a “mirroring mode” that shows “exactly the same view” on the second device as the user on the first device is seeing and interacting with, aiming to further assist the second device’s understanding of the route.

As AppleInsider notes, the patent credits Eran Sandel, Elad Harush, and Roman Guy as its inventors. As with all other patents, today’s “Sharing location information among devices” application is less of a confirmation of upcoming software by Apple and more of an intriguing look at ways the company may be looking to expand its little-used map-based features in the future.