The Apps and Workflows We Use to Cover Apple Earnings Calls 
Federico and John explain the apps and workflows they use to cover Apple earnings calls and then cover updates to Newsify on iOS and Twitterrific for macOS.
On paper, the differences between Apple’s iPhone cameras can be hard to discern year-to-year. That’s why I find photographer Austin Mann’s iPhone camera reviews so valuable. Every year, Mann puts Apple’s cameras through their paces while traveling around the world. In September, Mann took the iPhone 8 Plus to India. He’s back, this time from Guatemala, with a review of the iPhone X’s cameras.
Mann was particularly impressed with the iPhone X’s telephoto lens:
When we got the telephoto lens in the 7 Plus, it was a huge upgrade but the telephoto quality was noticeably less than the wide lens, especially in low light. This created a shooting conundrum… often wishing to zoom in but not wanting to sacrifice quality. Apple closed that gap this year by investing heavily into improving the telephoto lens.
The iPhone’s screen gets high marks too:
This probably the most amazing display I’ve ever seen. Colors pop, blacks are true black and contrast feels just right. I actually found it more rewarding to shoot & share because of how amazing the screen is.
During his tests, Mann also discovered that the iPhone X’s slow-sync flash has been substantially improved:
One of my favorite things about the iPhone 8 Plus review was the slow sync flash comparison against the 7 Plus so I decided to take the iPhone X to the streets for a similar test. While I set out to see the difference in slow shutter effects, what I actually found was the iPhone 7 was easily 2 seconds slower in focusing/firing when shooting moving objects in low light…
The technical differences between the lenses in an iPhone 8 Plus and X may seem small on paper. Austin Mann does an excellent job demonstrating the added flexibility those differences afford users in everyday situations. Be sure to check out his post for examples of what the iPhone X’s camera can do.
Jeremy Burge at Emojipedia explains what’s happening when iOS 11.1 replaces the letter ‘I’ with an ‘A’ followed by ‘⍰’:
What’s really going on is that the letter “I” is being appended with an invisible character known as Variation Selector 16 when auto-correct kicks in.
This VS-16 character is intended to be used to make the previous character have emoji appearance.1 When used in conjunction with the letter “I” it displays in some apps as “A ⍰”.The correct behaviour should be to ignore the invisible variation selector if the previous character doesn’t have an emoji version.
The bug, which was a hot topic on Twitter over the weekend, only affects some users. Until a software update is issued by Apple to fix the issue, the company recommends setting up a text replacement rule that replaces a capital ‘I’ with a lower case ‘i’ as a workaround.
Home Screen: John Voorhees The introduction of the Dock in iOS 11 caused me to completely rethink my approach to the Home screen of my first-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro. In the past, arranging my iPad Home screen was easy. The screen is so big that keeping apps within easy reach was never a factor like it is on...
Easy Editing of Wallet Passes iOS 11.1 added an edit button to Apple’s Wallet app that makes it far faster to delete unused passes from the app. Previously you had to tap a pass in Wallet, then tap the info button in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, which brought up details about the pass. The final step...
Inoreader These days I get the lion’s share of my news from Twitter, but RSS feeds still play an important role. I don’t like to clog my timeline with a lot of publications, so the links I find on Twitter tend to be things shared by people I follow instead. That’s a great way to...
There’s a debate raging in the halls of the Unicode Consortium, and the fate of creative expression hangs in the balance. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement, but the same could be said of some of the concerns raised in the dispute over the ‘Frowning Pile of Poo’ emoji. The unhappy pile, depicted above in an Emojipedia mockup, is under consideration for inclusion in the emoji lexicon alongside the happier version next fall, which has some Consortium members steaming mad.
BuzzFeed News published a story about the controversy today. Two typographers, Michael Everson and Andrew West, are leading the lobbying efforts against the frowning poo. Author Charlie Warzel reporting on a memo that Everson sent to the Consortium:
“Organic waste isn’t cute,” Everson wrote, aghast that the technical committee would even deign to consider additional excremoji. “It is bad enough that the Emoji Subcommittee came up with it, but it beggars belief that the Unicode Technical Committee actually approved it,” he wrote. Everson continued:
“The idea that our 5 committees would sanction further cute graphic characters based on this should embarrass absolutely everyone who votes yes on such an excrescence. Will we have a CRYING PILE OF POO next? PILE OF POO WITH TONGUE STICKING OUT? PILE OF POO WITH QUESTION MARKS FOR EYES? PILE OF POO WITH KARAOKE MIC? Will we have to encode a neutral FACELESS PILE OF POO?”
West penned a note to the Consortium voicing similar concerns.
It’s not clear yet what will become of ‘Frowning Pile of Poo.’ Final decisions on next year’s new emoji are still months away. One thing’s for sure though, form a committee, and literally, anything can become a drama.
Apple has just published its financial results for Q4 2017. The company posted revenue of $52.6 billion. Apple sold 10.3 million iPads, 46.7 million iPhones, and 5.4 million Macs during the quarter.
“We’re happy to report a very strong finish to a great fiscal 2017, with record fourth quarter revenue, year-over-year growth for all our product categories, and our best quarter ever for Services,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “With fantastic new products including iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, Apple Watch Series 3, and Apple TV 4K joining our product lineup, we’re looking forward to a great holiday season, and with the launch of iPhone X getting underway right now, we couldn’t be more excited as we begin to deliver our vision for the future with this stunning device.”
On this week’s episode, we dig into our favorite geeky macOS apps that we use for work and play.
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Federico
