Thank you, thank you, thank you! The Cloud has been out for a week now, and we’ve had consistent downloads. Thanks for listening.
It’s still Thursday, and I’m on with Mark Starling, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s top tech stories: Apple brings back the Magic at this year’s WWDC, and Elon Musk looks to Mars and not Twitter in latest beefs. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern by tuning into WWNC on the iHeartRadio app. Listen now.
MUSK THREATENS TO WALK AWAY FROM TWITTER DEAL…AGAIN
Let’s be honest, Elon Musk has been reaching for a reason to walk away from the Twitter deal. He hasn’t acted a would-be investor and buyer in a company he’s planning to take over at value. His behavior has been nothing less than erratic since announcing plans to buy Twitter for $44 billion, with a ‘B’. For those watching, he’s personally on the hook to pay $33.5 billion and is seeking $2 billion to $3 billion in financing from outside sources. He’s threatening to leave the deal because he doesn’t believe Twitter bots (non-human users) makeup only 5% of Twitter’s user base. He doesn’t believe Twitter’s math and modeling, despite Twitter disclaiming their user counts and reporting the figures to the SEC. If he welches on the deal, he owes Twitter $1 billion.
In the Latest Elon Musk Gossip
While he’s fighting this battle, he’s also beefing with Doge Coin’s creator, Jackson Palmer. Palmer called out Elon Musk saying, “he didn’t understand coding as well he purports himself to.” Musk as usual got upset and claimed Palmer didn’t right any Doge Coin code. Real talk, the allegation Musk isn’t that great of a programmer was made to me once.
APPLE BRINGS BACK THE MAGIC AT WWDC 2022
Dear Apple, I still don’t have a press credential, but thanks for another WWDC. WWDC happened this past Monday and for the first time in a long time, I’m excited about some of the changes Apple is bringing to its latest iPhone and iPad operating system, iOS16.
Editable and Recallable Messages
iMessages is getting some remarkable enhancements. Users will now be able to recall an iMessage after it’s been sent. If you mistakenly sent a message, you can now delete it from the conversations stream at all endpoints. I think this is an awesome feature and one that many people already use on chat apps and social apps. The other killer feature for the, uses punctuation in text messages GenX crowd, is an editing feature. Users can now make edits to their outbound text messages and the edits will show up to all parties on the conversation.
Another killer application baked across the operating system is Apple’s Live Text. The operating system will allow users to select and lift text off of images and video. For instance, you can watch a how-to video that has text prominently rendered on the screen. Live Text will allow you to select the text in the video and copy in a real text document or elsewhere. This will be create for developers or people following how-tos, or people who need to translate text from an image or picture into their native language.
Customizable Home Screen
It’s not very important for me, but Apple has finally given users the ability to customize their iPhone’s home screen. Users can change the fonts, colors, and type faces of the clock and information labels on the home screen. Users can also add live widgets on the screen too.
Ecosystem Continuity
Apple has always touted continuity between devices. You can now use your iPhone as a web camera in the latest editions of iOS and macOS. The feature works wireless and includes real-time filtering capabilities for enhancing your face versus the background. Another magical feature is Deskview which uses the iPhone’s super wide angle lens to simultaneously show a person in a webcam view and their workspace directly in front of them. How useful is it? Uh, who knows.
Collaborating
New collaboration features between iOS and macOS were originally conceived in the mid-80’s in the NeXT operating system conceived by Steve Jobs. The latest Apple operating system provide app developers with tools to perform instant collaboration between multiple desktop, iPhone, and iPad users. Users can share their desktops, application screens, and application data in a number of ways. Apple claims anything that you can work with can brought into a shareable board.
A Lot More
There was a lot in this year’s WWDC. Apple is shipping updates to CarPlay with the ability to add stops using Siri in the Maps app. New watchOS updates feature more complications, enhanced battery life, and connectivity between devices. And we’ll see higher performing chips this fall in the latest MacBook Pro lines with an M2 chip that’s 40% higher performing than the M1.
The new MacBook Pro with M2 silicon will ship in July.
iOS 16 will ship in the fall, probably after the iPhone event in September.
The latest macOS Ventura, is available for Apple Developer Program members now, will ship with the latest machines in July.
Tune Into The Cloud
I want to extend a very warm and gracious thanks to everyone who has listened to The Cloud. We got a solid stream of downloads in our first week of release. If you have tuned in, our first episode asked, “what happened to smart cities?” We invited Nick Maynard, the CEO of US Ignite to talk about smart city projects and striking a balance between technology and community support.
Our next show will explore how bias in AI impacts communities. It’s going to be a treat.
You can listen to The Cloud on Spotify.
