Today’s In the news post comes on Saturday instead of Friday thanks to my busy schedule at work plus lots of activities in my life as we started the prime portion of the Mardi Gras season here in New Orleans. Last night, I used my iPhone 11 Pro to take lots of pictures of friends and family at a nighttime parade, and Night Mode did an amazing job using the limited light available to produce pictures that I would have never been able to take before. Not every picture came out great — the ones with lots of motion got blurred — but I knew that would happen so I just took lots of pictures. After deleting the ones that didn’t work, I’m left with a great set. Night Mode is really a fantastic feature. I wish my iPhone pictures from previous years were so good. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- California attorney David Sparks created an interesting home screen for his iPhone using Shortcuts.
- Edmund Lee of the New York Times reports that Judge Victor Marrero of Southern District of New York rejected a challenge by 13 attorneys general to the T-Mobile and Sprint merger, clearing the way for the merger to go through.
- I love my iPad Pro. It debuted in October 2018, but it works so well that I don’t have many good ideas of what would make it better. But there are rumors that a new iPad Pro is coming out soon, and in an article for Macworld, Dan Moren has a few ideas for what might be included.
- I don’t edit podcasts, but it amazes me that this complicated task can be done on an iPad Pro, and it can be done quite well using an app called Ferrite Recording Studio along with an Apple Pencil. Jason Snell of Six Colors shows how Ferrite works, and even if your primary interaction with podcasts is just listening to them, you will find this interesting. In addition to showing how the app works, Snell shows how the content of podcasts is edited to make the final product sound more professional.
- TJ Louma reviews Bobby, an iPhone app that you can use to track your subscription services.
- Microsoft Word for iOS was updated to version 2.34 this week. The release notes say: “Redesigned From Scratch: We have redesigned the app to be simpler, faster and more beautiful than before.” That sounds like it would be significant update, or at least a noticeable update, but so far I’m having trouble seeing what is new on my iPad. And I use Word on my iPad almost every day, so I would think I would notice. According to Erik Schwiebert, the Principal Software Engineer in the Apple Productivity Experiences group at Microsoft, this update is part of an effort to increase mobile productivity that was described by Jon Friedman, the head of Microsoft Office Design, in this article from December 2019.
- As reported by Samuel Axon of Ars Technica, Google announced that Gmail for iOS was updated this week to support the Files app.
- Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports that a woman in Oklahoma credits the Apple Watch for figuring out that her 13-year-old son had an unusually high heart rate and need to go to the emergency room to have a procedure that took over seven hours. I know that many schools, especially middle schools, don’t allow electronic devices like an Apple Watch during the day, and there are good reasons for that, but it worked out well for this boy that he was able to wear his during school.
- Emanuel Maiberg of Motherboard posted a review of the iPhone 6s. Yes, the 6s, which was released in 2015. You certainly cannot say that he rushed this review.
- And finally, travel photographer Harshit Vora created this fantastic video of Egypt using his iPhone 11 Pro: