Apple Maps Now Supports Transit Directions in Salt Lake City

Apple Maps has been updated with comprehensive transit data for Salt Lake City, Utah, enabling iPhone users in the city and certain suburbs to navigate using Utah Transit Authority public transportation, including the TRAX light rail system, FrontRunner commuter train, S-Line streetcar, and buses.

Apple introduced Transit in Maps as part of iOS 9 in select cities around the world, including Baltimore, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Sydney, Toronto, and over 300 cities in China. The feature has its own tab in Apple Maps on iOS 10 when entering directions.

Transit routing is now available in several other cities around the world, including Atlanta, Columbus, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Honolulu, Kansas City, Melbourne, Miami, Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Montréal, Pittsburgh, Portland, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, and Seattle.

(Thanks, Bernd!)

Tags: Apple Maps, transit
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Nanotechnology discovery could lead to low-power night vision

Night vision technology is essential on the modern battlefield but is not without its shortcomings. Conventional night vision goggles (NVGs) have been compared to looking “through toilet paper tubes” on account of their drastically diminished peripheral view. Even the top-of-the-line L-3 Ground Panoramic NGVs — the ones used by US special forces during the Osama bin Laden raid — are heavy, cumbersome and require an external power source. However, a breakthrough discovery out of the Australian National University could give us NGVs that are no thicker than a pair of normal sunglasses.

Conventional NGVs rely on a process called cascaded secondary emission. Ambient low-level and near-infrared light are first collected by the goggle’s objective lens. The photons are then converted into electrons and travel down a vacuum-sealed onto a plate studded with millions of tiny holes. As the electrons pass through these holes, they set off a chain reaction that releases hundreds of other electrons — all in the same pattern as the original photon — which then hit a phosphorescent plate to create the familiar green-tinted image. The problem is that this process demands thousands of volts of electricity to generate the number of electrons needed to be effective.

The Australian team’s process instead relies on aluminum gallium arsenide nanostructures that do basically the same thing but without the vacuum tubes. “We managed to fabricate very teeny, tiny structures. Those magic structures are capable [of] changing the intensity of the light, change the shape of the light, and, at the same time, change the color of the light,” Mohsen Rahmani explained in an ANU video. “Our eyes are capable only of seeing light in the visible spectrum. If we can fabricate an area of nanostructures on flat surfaces like glass, at the end of the day we will be able to convert invisible light in the nighttime or dark areas into visible light.”

The new process would still require an external energy supply to work, but would need only a fraction of a conventional NVG’s power. What’s more, it can be produced as a thin film — similar to printed solar cells — which will drastically reduce the bulk and weight of future NVGs. The team has submitted their findings to DARPA for further development.

Source: Defense One

Tim Cook to Attend Donald Trump’s Tech Summit on Wednesday

Apple CEO Tim Cook is among a small group of tech leaders who plan to attend President-elect Donald Trump’s reported tech summit at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Wednesday, according to Recode.

Apple CEO Tim Cook and President-elect Donald Trump (Photo: Gage Skidmore)
Other attendees will allegedly include the CEOs of Google parent company Alphabet, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Intel, and Oracle. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was also invited, and he is likely to attend, the report noted.

There could be a few other attendees, as invites reportedly continued to be sent by Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and presidential transition team adviser and tech investor Peter Thiel late into the week.

A handful of tech leaders have reportedly declined the invitation, as the report noted some of the technology companies and executives disagree with Trump on a myriad of key issues, ranging from encryption to immigration reform.

“Look, this is obviously a circus,” said one person close to the situation. “Everyone in tech just wants to be invisible right now when it comes to this administration, but has to participate since we have done it before.”

In addition, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has reportedly sent mixed signals about being invited or not, while SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk was called an “obvious invite,” although it is unclear if he will be attending.

Attending
• Apple CEO Tim Cook
• Alphabet CEO Larry Page
• Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
• Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins
• IBM CEO Ginni Rometty
• Intel CEO Brian Krzanich
• Oracle CEO Safra Catz
• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (Likely)
Not Attending
• Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
• Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky
• Netflix CEO Reed Hastings
• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff
• Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield
• Dropbox CEO Drew Houston
• HP CEO Meg Whitman
• Mark Cuban

The topics to be discussed at the roundtable meeting were not disclosed, but Trump has previously expressed his desires to reform the corporate tax code, reduce regulation, and negotiate better trade deals with other countries.

Trump previously said he plans to offer Apple a “very large tax cut” alongside “substantial regulation cuts” that will incentivize the iPhone maker to manufacture its products in the United States, rather than in China and other overseas countries.

“We’re going to get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of in other countries,” said Trump, while campaigning at Liberty University in Virginia earlier this year.

Apple did reportedly ask its Taiwanese manufacturing partner Foxconn to study the possibility of moving iPhone production to the United States, although Foxconn chairman Terry Gou was said to be less enthusiastic about the idea due to inevitably higher production costs compared to China.

Meanwhile, Trump called for an Apple boycott after the company refused to comply with a court order to unlock the iPhone used by shooter Syed Farook in the San Bernardino attack last December. The FBI later dropped its lawsuit against Apple after reportedly turning to Israeli company Cellebrite to crack the iPhone.

Trump said Cook congratulated him on winning the election, but the Apple chief was personally a Hillary Clinton supporter. Following Trump’s victory, Cook urged Apple employees to “move forward together” despite “uncertainties ahead.”

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Tags: Tim Cook, Donald Trump
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Apple Plans to Release Swift 3.1 in Spring 2017

Apple has announced it plans to release Swift 3.1 in the spring of 2017, corresponding to some point between March and June.

Swift 3.1 is intended to be source compatible with Swift 3.0 and will contain a few enhancements to the core programming language.

Improvements will also be made to the Swift Package Manager, Swift on Linux, compiler, and Standard Library.

Swift 3.1 development should conclude around January 16, 2017 for major changes, at which point Apple’s focus will turn to the development of Swift 4.

Swift is Apple’s open source programming language for macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Linux. Swift 3.0 was released in September with major improvements and refinements to the core language and Standard Library, major additions to the Linux port of Swift, and the first official release of the Swift Package Manager.

Tag: Swift
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Unicode Proposes Regional Emoji Flags for Next Year

The Unicode Consortium has announced a proposed update to its emoji documentation that provides support for regional flag emojis.

As noted by Emojipedia, the new functionality and guidelines would allow for Apple and other vendors to implement emojis for regions such as U.S. states, Canadian provinces and territories, or countries of the United Kingdom.

Flags representing California or Texas, for example, or England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, could be added in a future iOS update.

The Unicode Consortium stopped short of recommending specific flags for vendors to support, and it said there is no requirement that any of the regional flags be supported. In other words, Apple in particular would be free to choose which regional flags to add to its iOS and macOS platforms if any.

Emojipedia said the Emoji 5.0 update is likely to be released in the first half of 2017, although an official date has not been specified. The proposed update is currently available for public review and feedback until January 16, 2017.

Some apps such as WhatsApp have already worked around the existing Unicode standards to support flags for England, Scotland, Wales, and other regions.

Tags: emoji, Unicode Consortium
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Your next heart monitor could be graphene-coated Silly Putty

For a child’s toy, Silly Putty has some downright crazy physical properties. The mixture of boric acid and silicon oil, originally developed as a synthetic replacement for rubber, is a non-Newtonian fluid. Its viscosity isn’t affected by temperature, but rather external force — that is, its rate of flow depends on how hard you push or stretch it. And while its original inventors were content to leave it as a plaything, a team of researchers from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland are about to put it to work in the medical field.

“It’s got these strange properties but it never really found an application,” Trinity College physicist, Jonathan Coleman, told NPR. “So we thought, if we could make it do something, that would be cool.” That something involved coating Silly Putty with graphene — a form of carbon that measures just one atom in thickness. By combining graphene’s electrical conductivity with the putty’s odd fluidity, the team created a material that both conducts a charge and is exceptionally sensitive to pressure. Any amount of force applied to it will modulate the material’s electrical resistance.

It’s so sensitive, in fact, that if you stick a bit of it to your throat, it can monitor not just the pulse of your carotid artery but your blood pressure as well. It’s even reportedly capable of detecting a spider’s footsteps. The material does have to be handled carefully, though, because as any parent can tell you, the second that stuff gets into the carpet, you’re going to need a new carpet.

Via: NPR

Source: Science

Google’s iMessage competitor isn’t Allo, it’s texting

Android may get its iMessage competitor, but it’s not going to be sexy or blue.

One of the main reasons the iPhone, and iOS, continues to be so compelling is iMessage, the thick blue bubble of exclusivity in the messaging space. Android users are left out, and will likely continue to be for the foreseeable future — despite the occasional rumor to the contrary.

But as Android users wait for that morsel of Apple, Google is taking things into its own proverbial hands by partnering with Sprint on what could end up being a viable competitor to iMessage on Android. Powered by Jibe, a company Google acquired in 2015, Google’s RCS — Rich Communication Services — uses what’s known as the Universal Profile, a set of features and protocols set by the GSMA aimed at standardizing the way carriers, manufacturers and developers implement native messaging. Essentially, Google is building WhatsApp and iMessage into its own native Messenger app.

Every U.S. carrier has agreed to transition their proprietary implementations of RCS to the Universal Standard by sometime in 2017.

The features are great: real-time typing indicators and read receipts; higher-resolution photos and video (goodbye MMS), seamless and bug-free group messages, and more. They’re so great that they should relieve some of the pressure from Android users who want a seamless iMessage-like experience in the native Android SMS app. Some of the pressure.

There’s only one problem: RCS in its current form is limited to Sprint, and only on through one SMS app, Google’s own Messenger. Not only that, but despite the openness of Universal Profile and its, well, universal availability, its cloud-based backend is still controlled by Google. One could argue that as long as Big G decides not to make any big changes to an open standard (remember when Google forked WebKit for its own purposes?) and continues to work with manufacturers and carriers, things will be fine, but standards have a way of morphing over time according to business priorities.

Still, every U.S. carrier, including AT&T, which isn’t actually on GSMA’s list of supports, has agreed to transition their proprietary implementations of RCS to the Universal Standard by sometime in 2017. This should coincide with Release 2 of RCS’s evolution, with the rollout of Messaging as a Platform, APIs, plug-in integration, improved authentication and app security. That means other app developers could build in RCS support.

But those compromises in authentication and app security — the lack of end-to-end encryption, for instance — have kept some providers and manufacturers at bay, and a comparison to iMessage less apt than it may one day be. RCS, for all of its inertia, is still a very nascent standard, while iMessage has been percolating for over half a decade, and has recently been updated to support apps, stickers and more. Then there’s the $10 billion question: will Apple, even with iMessage, one day support RCS for its own text messages? Will the green bubbles be scoffed at less by iPhone users if they, too, get to see read receipts, improved group messages and higher-resolution photos and videos? Could those plain green bubble text messages one day, too, be sent over carrier’s data networks using end-to-end encryption, making them impossible for the providers themselves to intercept and governments less able to subpoena?

Will Apple, even with iMessage, one day support RCS for its own text messages?

Al of these improvements will certainly help users, but is there a financial incentive? And what happens when Google decides to really make a go of Allo, its own closed, AI-powered mobile messenger with big plans for WhatsApp and iMessage? Allo has undoubtedly been a huge disappointment for Google, though based on the number of entrenched messaging platforms out there I wonder if the top brass really thought it would shake out differently. Even the average near-Luddite likely has at least two messaging apps installed on his or her device — WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and maybe Skype, Viber, or Kik — and increasingly Twitter and Snapchat, even Instagram, are being coopted at private communication tools. It’s increasingly difficult for a company like Google — GOOGLE, potentially the most powerful influencer of user habits in the world next to Apple — to effect real change in this saturated market.

That’s why RCS is so important, because its success, should it come, will be accidental. But that success hinges on cooperation between competitors, and the ability for Google to stand back and let a product take shape in the name of altruism and open standards.

A few more thoughts for the week:

• We’re rebooting our Instagram account, with an emphasis on your best photos and plenty of Stories. Between Florence and I, you can expect a lot more social content and a bunch of really fun ways to interact with AC directly. Should be fun!
• Speaking of fun, Modern Dad is really great, and Phil — who I promise will be back on the podcast soon! — is making all kinds of technology, from $50 tablets to $200 connected doorbells, accessible and super fun.
• It’s nearly CrackBerry’s 10th birthday. Kevin Michaluk was the catalyst for a lot of us old-timers to get into tech blogging, and I couldn’t be more proud of him.
• My Toronto FC lost to Andrew’s Seattle Sounders in penalty kicks in a frigid MLS cup match last night. I have a bunch of friends who
  braved the cold ’til the end, and while I’m sore over the loss, I’m even more so over the ensuing chirping I am sure to receive in the days ahead.
• Speaking of losses, the Galaxy Note 7 narrative has reached its sad, glacial end. Starting next week, all U.S. Note 7s will receive a mandatory update bricking them. No more charging, no more cellular functionality. The sad part is that there are over 130,000 units still unreturned, even after all this.
• No podcast this week. We don’t usually skip a week, but when we do it’s for a good reason.

Have a great Sunday, and we’ll talk again soon!

– Daniel