Episode 12 of the In the News podcast is now available, and I thought that this was a particularly good one. In this week's episode, Brett Burney and I discuss iPhone security, tools for enhancing photographs, how Apple is making so much money, comparisons between Apple's MagSafe Battery Pack and similar items sold by third parties, The Beatles, spatial music, and taking photographs at night.
Finally, in our In the Know segment, Brett and I both recommend apps that work particularly well on the Apple Watch. Brett recommends Thwip, an app that creates fun sound effects like sad trombone and a rim shot. I recommend Swipe Scoreboard, a useful app for keeping score. I've enjoyed using that one when watching my daughter play soccer.
Earlier this week, Apple released iOS 14.7.1 and similar updates for the iPad and Mac. And yesterday, Apple released a similar update for the Apple Watch. If you haven’t updated yet, do so now. As Juli Clover of MacRumors reports, this update fixes a flaw i the operating systems that Apple believe was actually being used — not just some theoretical bug. As security expert John Simek of the digital forensics firm Sensei Enterprises explained on his blog, this flaw allowed a bad guy to essentially “own the device.” This is an example of the type of flaws being used by the Pegasus software from NSO Group, which I discussed last week. For some of these security flaws, once a bad guy has access to your device, they can continue to “own the device” so long as the hacker’s software remains in memory. Thus, the Associated Press reported this week that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) recommends rebooting your phone at least once a week just in case any malware happens to be in memory and running. Your iPhone could be hacked again — and apparently, the Pegasus software tries to automate this process when it notices that an iPhone is restarted — but at least you are making it harder for the bad guys. And now, the news of note from the past week:
If you are heading to an Apple Store, don’t forget to wear a mask. And frankly, with the Delta variant, if you are heading ANYWHERE right now, you should wear a mask. Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reports that Apple restored a mask requirement at most of its retails stores in the United States this week.
The battery in an AirTag should last about a year. When you are alerted that it is time to replace the battery, you use a standard CR2032 battery, which is about the size of a small coin. Because this battery is so small, it is sometimes swallowed by children — which is dangerous — and thus some battery manufacturers now add a non-toxic bitter coating to the battery to deter a child from swallowing the battery once it is placed in the child’s mouth. That sounds like a smart idea but, according to Dave Mark of The Loop, Apple advised this week that CR2032 batteries with a bitterant coating might not work with the AirTag.
Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac reviews the Device Therapy Bike Mount & Reflector, a $15.99 bike reflector that hides an AirTag so that (hopefully) a bike thief won’t notice that it is there, allowing you to retrieve a stolen bike.
Bradley Chambers of 9to5Mac compares Apple’s new MagSafe Battery Pack to the Anker Magnetic Battery Pack.
You can currently listen to The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in Spatial Audio on Apple Music (click here to do so). But Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone interviewed The Beatles producer Giles Martin this week, and Martin says that the current mix is based on a theatrical production so he doesn’t think that the mix is quite right for a smaller device like the iPhone. He plans to produce a new mix and replace the current version. On the other hand, Martin thinks that the Spatial Audio version of Abbey Road (click here) is much better. I agree that Abbey Road in Spatial Audio sounds great, especially Here Comes the Sun (link) and instruments like the drums in Come Together (link). If you have any interest in Spatial Audio, that Rolling Stone interview is worth reading because Martin describes the process of creating a Dolby Atmos mix, how it works when you are using headphones instead of speakers, and more.
CNN is currently airing a series called History of the Sitcom. Kyle Moss of Yahoo Entertainment reports that, in the most recent episode, show creator Greg Daniels notes that one of the things that made The Office such a successful sitcom in 2005 was that high school and college kids were watching episodes on a video iPod — an audience that NBC never realized would enjoy the show. I wasn’t a teenager at that time, but I also remember watching episodes of TV shows like The Office and Lost on my video iPod back in 2005 and 2006, a time when I wasn’t living in New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina. I have no doubt that the popularity of the video iPod played a role in the development of the iPhone.
And finally, Apple released a video this week in which Apple employee Landon speaks with photographer Maria Lax about how she uses an iPhone to take outdoor pictures at night that have an otherworldly feel to them. The video includes lots of tips on taking night photography.
In my recent review of MyHeritage, I focused on using the app to build a family tree. Today, I want to focus on another feature of the app and the MyHeritage website that provides a different service: the ability to enhance old photographs. Whether you use just the basic Photos app or something more sophisticated like Photoshop to manage and improve your photos, there are already lots of ways to enhance photos. But when it comes to old photographs, such as photographs of what family members looked like decades ago, there are two common issues that can be difficult to fix with traditional software: the color fades over time (and sometimes, there is no color to begin with because the picture is black-and-white), and the photos are not nearly as sharp as modern photographs. MyHeritage gives you the ability to address those two issues — and do so automatically.
Improve photographs
Using MyHeritage to improve the color or sharpness in a photograph is very simple. Upload a photo and choose the option to colorize or enhance. (You can choose either option at first and then you can choose the other option next.) The colorize option will add color to a black-and-white photograph or will enhance the color in a faded photograph. Here are some demos from the MyHeritage website:
I don’t want to share photos, let alone manipulated photos, of other people without permission, so instead I am sharing some old photographs of myself to show off these features. In this first example, I have a black-and-white photograph from when I was in Seventh Grade from a yearbook. I used the colorize feature, and here is what MyHeritage came up with:
I don’t know if those colors are at all true to life, and MyHeritage doesn’t give you the ability to change colors. But the colorized version of this old photo does seem fairly realistic.
There is other software available that can do the same thing. For example, less than a year ago, Adobe added several Neural Engine filters to Photoshop that use AI to improve photos, and one of those new filters automatically adds color to a black-and-white photo with just one click. And the advantage of using Photoshop is that you can add many other adjustments to get just the result that you want. Here is what I created in Photoshop by clicking the colorize button and then spending about 10 more seconds to adjust the color levels:
I think that the color added by MyHeritage is a little better than what I produced in Photoshop in 10 seconds, but if I had spent more time in Photoshop with this picture, I suspect that I could have produced a much better result. Having said that, Photoshop is complicated to use and is incredibly intimidating to a new user. In contrast, most anyone can figure out how to click the one button in MyHeritage to add color to an old photo.
You can also use MyHeritage to improve the quality of a face in an old photo by using the enhance feature. This feature uses sophisticated artificial intelligence — the result of examining a huge number of photographs that are somewhat similar to your photo — to add detail and focus to the blurry portions of a face in your photo. I have a large number of older photographs that were never that sharp to begin with, and they may have even gotten a little blurrier when the photographs were scanned to add them to my Photos library. I found that the MyHeritage enhance feature often produced very impressive results. For example, here is a photograph that was taken of me when I was about 16 months old — first, the version that I had in my Photos library, which I had already tried to enhance using the tools in the Photos app, and second the version produced by MyHeritage just by clicking the enhance button:
Here is a close up on the face to make the difference more obvious:
Of course, I don’t really know what I looked like at this age, but the enhanced version of the photo does seem to me to be a lot more true-to-life. It is certainly less blurry.
Software that attempts to use AI to add details when it is missing from a photograph can sometimes make dramatic mistakes. About a year ago, James Vincent wrote this article for The Verge in which he showed that, because the AI used by one company seems to have been trained on mostly white faces, providing the AI with a fuzzy picture of Barack Obama produced a sharpened result that resembled a white male, not our former president.
Although the AI used by MyHeritage produced good results on most of my pictures, there were a few photos of my family members that did not turn out so well. The enhanced photograph would sometimes look too fake, more like a cartoon than a photo. For example, after I added color to that old picture of me in Seventh Grade, I then told MyHeritage to enhance my face, and I think that the result looks too fake:
Nevertheless, in most of my tests, the enhance feature in MyHeritage produced impressive results. The nice thing about having access to this feature is that if you try one photograph and don’t like the result, just try another one and it may come out better.
Animate photographs
The iPhone uses a feature called Live Photos which can (optionally) record a few seconds of video at the same time that it takes a photograph. As a result, the iPhone can help you to relive a memory with not just a still photograph but also an animated photograph with a small amount of video and sound.
The Live Photos feature has been around since the iPhone 6s was introduced in September of 2015. But what if you have a picture older than that — perhaps much older? MyHeritage also has the ability to use AI to try to create an animated version of the photograph using a technology it calls Deep Nostalgia. The idea is that you may have a relative from many generations ago who you never knew in real life, or a picture of someone now deceased who you did know, and by animating the picture you have more of a sense that you are really seeing that person again.
Sometimes the results are impressive. Since this feature was introduced many months ago, I’ve seen a few examples become viral videos. Here is an example with some historical figures, and while some results are better than others, most of them do provide the illusion that you are seeing more of the person than the picture alone would provide:
On the other hand, in my tests with my own old photos, the feature was interesting, but virtually always produced results that were so obviously fake that they seemed a little creepy.
When you use the animation feature, MyHeritage first enhances the photo. It needs to do this to have a high-quality picture to start with. Then, MyHeritage zooms in on just the face. Finally, the software animates the face. There are lots of different animation styles, so if you don’t like the results of one type of animation you can choose another one. For example, for the old picture of me I showed you above, the default animation style, which MyHeritage simply calls Animation #7, made my eyes seem weird. Click here to play that video (and they use your Back button to come back to this post).
I tried all of the other animation styles, and the one called sideways looked a little better, but it still had the Uncanny Valley effect because it is almost realistic, but not quite. Click here to play the second video.
For me, the animation feature seemed like a gimmick, and after a while, I grew tired of using it. But for some photos, in some circumstances, I’ll admit that it does produce some interesting and impressive results.
Pricing
In the first part of my review of MyHeritage, I mentioned the different subscription plans. If you have paid for the Complete subscription to MyHeritage ($299 a year, but $199 for the first year), you can enhance and/or animate an unlimited number of photos using Deep Nostalgia. The other, lesser expensive, plans have a more limited number of animations and enhancements, but I’m not sure what that number is. I believe that even the free subscription includes a few animations and enhancements so that you have a chance to try out these features. (MyHeritage gave me free access to the Complete subscription for a limited time for the purpose of preparing this review, so that’s the version that I’ve been using.)
The bigger picture
When I use the enhance and colorize features of MyHeritage, I feel comfortable with the results because I feel like I am restoring what was originally there more than I am creating something new. But the Deep Nostalgia animation feature, while interesting, may go a little too far for me. I’m just not sure. I definitely understand the allure of using technology to help to form a greater connection, but there is also a creepiness element for me.
In this recent article by Jason Fagone of the San Francisco Chronicle, the reporter describes how a person who lost his fiancee was able to use a sophisticated AI chatbot program to simulate text messages conversations with her even though she was deceased. The AI looked at samples of her writing and then used that to have conversations with the man. Is this an appropriate coping mechanism or just an episode of Black Mirror?
Of course, as this technology becomes more accessible, it can also be used to create deep fake videos that appear to be realistic, showing a person doing or saying something, when in reality someone just swapped one face for another. One of the best examples I’ve seen of is a series of TikTok videos created by Chris Ume, a visual effects specialist in Belgium. He had Tom Cruise impersonator Miles Fisher act out some scenes and then Ume replaced Fisher’s face with Tom Cruise’s fact, and the results are amazing:
Here is a behind-the-scenes video that shows you how this was done:
Of course, it is easy to imagine this technology being abused: creating fake videos to unfairly embarrass a person, create fake evidence for a trial, etc. A few months ago, Geoffrey Fowler of The Washington Post discussed these issues, and he noted that a woman in Pennsylvania was arrested earlier this year after she allegedly altered photos to make it look like rivals of her daughter on the cheerleader squad were drinking, smoking, and even nude in an attempt to get them kicked off the squad. [UPDATE: If you do not subscribe to The Washington Post, click here to read that article for free using the new Washington Post Gift function.] A more recent story from the Daily Mail indicates that the story may be more complicated, but no matter what happened in Pennsylvania, the Tom Cruise video shows you what is already possible today, and it is a little scary to think of what will be possible in just a few more years as computers become more powerful and the software improves.
To address this concern, MyHeritage creates a small watermark on the bottom left of enhanced, colorized, and animated photos. The MyHeritage website explains: “The magic wand icon appears on all enhanced photos so that users can tell them apart from the original. In photos that were both enhanced and colorized, the magic wand and palette icons will appear side by side on the bottom left corner. We hope that this responsible practice will be adopted by others who use photo enhancement technology.”
Conclusion
Whether you see the Deep Nostalgia animation feature of MyHeritage as a fun and interesting way to bring a photo to life or you see it as something too creepy to ever use, the technology is still fascinating and technologically impressive. The end result you can get from MyHeritage may not be nearly as impressive as what someone like Chris Ume can do, but considering that you can use a feature like this by simply clicking a button and waiting a few seconds, perhaps what MyHeritage is doing is even more remarkable.
As for the colorize and enhance features, I find them to be rather impressive. There is other software available that can do the same thing, but those products can be expensive and hard to use. MyHeritage is incredibly simple to use. By including this technology as a part of a MyHeritage subscription, the company has made the subscription more valuable.
Click here to get MyHeritage for iPad or iPhone (free):
Yesterday, Apple released the results for its 2021 fiscal third quarter (which ran from March 28, 2021, to June 26, 2021) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results. This is typically not a big fiscal quarter for Apple; the important quarter for Apple every year is the first fiscal quarter (containing the holiday sales season). But this time last year, with so many people buying Apple products during the beginning of the pandemic as they worked and went to school from home, Apple had a record fiscal third quarter. And every quarter since then has been a record quarter for Apple, including the one that just ended. Yesterday, Apple announced that it had its best fiscal third quarter ever, reporting record revenue of $81.4 billion, up an impressive 36% from the $59.7 billion it reported this time last year. If you want to get all of the nitty-gritty details, you can listen to the audio from the announcement conference call on the Apple website, or you can read a transcript of the call prepared by Jason Snell of Six Colors. Apple's official press release is here. Here are the items that stood out to me.
Part of Apple CEO Tim Cook's opening remarks included this statement, which I thought was well-written:
This quarter saw a growing sense of optimism from consumers in the United States and around the world, driving renewed hope for a better future and for all that innovation can make possible. But as the last 18 months have demonstrated many times before, progress made is not progress guaranteed. An uneven recovery to the pandemic and a Delta variant surging in many countries around the world have shown us once again that the road to recovery will be a winding one. In the midst of that enduring adversity, we are especially humbled that our technology has continued to play a key role in keeping our customers connected.
iPhone
iPhone revenue for the quarter was $39.57 billion, which I believe is an all-time record for a fiscal third quarter. One year ago, it was $26.418 billion, so that's a substantial 50% increase in iPhone revenue from last year.
Cook said that iPhone sales saw "very strong, double-digit growth in each geographic segment" with high demand for the iPhone 12 line.
Apple CFO Luca Maestri noted that demand for iPhones "exceed[ed] our own expectations, as the iPhone 12 family continued to be in very high demand."
Cook noted that more people upgraded their iPhones in the past quarter than in any prior fiscal third quarter.
To give you some context for the increase in iPhone revenue this past quarter, here is a chart showing the year-over-year percentage change since fiscal 2013 Q1, which is when Apple started reporting this type of revenue in this form. For the past three quarters, Apple seems to be returning to the impressive iPhone revenue growth it last saw in 2014-2015:
iPad
iPad revenue was $7.368 billion, up 12% from $6.582 billion this time last year.
Cook said that the "iPad had its highest June quarter in nearly a decade." Maestri noted that Apple saw this result even though there were "significant supply constraints" for parts needed to make the iPad.
Maestri noted that "with more people working from home, more people studying from home, we know that iPad and Mac demand was very, very strong" in the past quarter.
When describing some of the new features coming to iPadOS this Fall, Cook noted that "new productivity features make iPad an even more useful tool for multitasking, helping users navigate across apps, split their screen, or use Quick Note to capture a thought, the moment inspiration strikes."
Here is a chart to show the year-over-year percentage change in iPad revenue since fiscal 2013 Q1, which is when Apple started reporting this type of revenue in this form. Although iPad revenue growth was not nearly as impressive in the most recent quarter as the prior quarter, this most recent quarter along with the prior four quarters showed five consecutive quarters of iPad revenue growth.
Other
Cook noted that the services sold by Apple had a new all-time revenue record. This includes subscribers to Apple TV+.
In the past quarter, nearly 75% of people purchasing an Apple Watch were purchasing their first Apple Watch. In China, that number was 85%.
Episode 11 of the In the News podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, Brett Burney and I discuss the recent news about the NSO Group’s Pegasus software, which can be used to hack into an iPhone. Next, we talk about Apple accessories, including accessories for the AirTag, and Apple’s new Magsafe Battery Pack.
Finally, in our In the Know segment, Brett and I both share tips for getting more out of the iPhone’s Messages app
The big technology story this week was prompted by Amnesty International, which somehow obtained information about iPhones and Android devices targeted by Pegasus software sold by NSO Group. NSO Group is a company in Israel that sells, at incredibly high prices, software that can be used to take over a smartphone. NSO Group asserts that it only sells to governments and requires governments to promise to only use the software against criminals, but it looks like some governments misused the software to target human rights activists, journalists, and others disliked by those in power. A number of news organizations around the world worked on publishing stories all throughout the week, such as this article by Craig Timberg, Reed Albergotti and Elodie Guéguen in the Washington Post. One of the surprising details in the article is that someone using the software just needed to know the phone number of a target iPhone. The software would sometimes send a text message with a link that the owner would have to tap to have the malware installed. But other times the text message would contain a malformed image that caused an iPhone to execute code and hack the iPhone even without the owner doing anything. Just having the text message received by the iPhone was enough to begin the hack. Once an iPhone or Android phone was compromised, the Pegasus software can track the phone, read contents on the phone, and even turn on the camera and microphone. This is scary stuff. In another article in the Washington Post by Elizabeth Dwoskin and Shira Rubin, one of the owners of NSO Group defends what the company does, explaining that he has received reports from governments that they have used the software to arrest very dangerous criminals. But NSO Group almost never knows whether the Pegasus software is being used properly or improperly.
The iPhone has a well-earned reputation for being the most secure smartphone on the market. But that doesn’t mean it is 100% safe. And while there are some things that iPhone owners can do to improve security, such as installing new iOS updates when they become available and not tapping on links that come from questionable sources, the smartest hackers in the world are very good at finding exploits. Of course, this issue is not unique to smartphones. If a nation-state wants to target you, it can be almost impossible to protect yourself, even if you flee to another country.
Here is Apple’s statement on this news item, as reported to 9to5Mac: “Apple unequivocally condemns cyberattacks against journalists, human rights activists, and others seeking to make the world a better place. For over a decade, Apple has led the industry in security innovation and, as a result, security researchers agree iPhone is the safest, most secure consumer mobile device on the market. Attacks like the ones described are highly sophisticated, cost millions of dollars to develop, often have a short shelf life, and are used to target specific individuals. While that means they are not a threat to the overwhelming majority of our users, we continue to work tirelessly to defend all our customers, and we are constantly adding new protections for their devices and data.”
Many years ago, the FBI tried to get courts to force Apple to develop a backdoor in the iPhone so that the government could use the backdoor against criminals. Apple resisted, pointing out that if a backdoor was created, nothing would stop the bad guys from using it too. As this NSO Group story reveals, sometimes, in some parts of the world, the government and the bad guys are the same people. And on that uplifting note, here is the rest of the news of note from the past week:
Let’s transition from the scary to the silly. When I noted in my review of Weather Strip earlier this week that developers of weather apps have an opportunity to come up with new ways to present the same weather data that all other apps present, it never occurred to me that CARROT Weather would be updated this week to add the ability to record your own weather report. Just read the on-screen script as if it were a teleprompter, and you will quickly create a funny, but accurate, weather report that you can share. This is totally silly, but the feature is so well implemented that it is a lot of fun. Illinois attorney John Voorhees of MacStories describes this feature and everything else that was added to CARROT Weather this week.
You can now buy Apple’s AirTag accessories on Amazon including the AirTag Loop (regular and leather) and the AirTag Leather Key Ring. They even come in some new colors. That’s great, but I recommend that you consider the less expensive $12.95 Key Ring or Case with Strap sold by Belkin. The Belkin products have worked really well for me for the last few months. The Key Ring case is just a simple piece of smooth plastic, but it does the job and feels really good in the hand, which is important because your keys are often in your hand.
In an article in Macworld, Moren came up with three interesting features that Apple could add to the iPhone and Apple Watch.
This week, we’ve started to see initial reviews of Apple’s newest hardware product, the MagSafe Battery Pack, such as this report by Jacob Krol of CNN. It looks chunkier than I had expected after just looking at Apple’s product photos on its website, but I’ve seen lots of positive reports about how it feels. I haven’t yet seen any good reports on how much it can extend the life of your iPhone, but I presume we will start to see those reports next week after people have had more time to run tests.
Stephen Warwick of iMore points out that if you have an iPhone Lightning dock, like this model that I reviewed in 2017, you can place the Apple MagSafe Battery Pack in that dock to create a magnetic charging stand. That’s clever.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet notes that Apple released iOS 14.7 this week, and in addition to a few new features, it fixes some other security flaws — I’m sure the same sort of flaws that NSO Group and others have been exploiting.
José Adorno of 9to5Mac explains the steps that you can take if your iPhone is stolen. He also points out that when iOS 15 comes out this Fall, it will add a new feature that allows you to wipe the contents of a stolen iPhone while still retaining the ability to track it, which is a great idea.
And finally, Apple released a new video this week called Hello Sunshine, which shows off some of the ways that you might be inspired to be more active with an Apple Watch. It’s a cute video.
Weather apps can be some of the most interesting apps on the iPhone. That may seem strange for me to say because they all do the same thing — show the current weather and the forecast for the next few days — often using the same sources. But as a result, a main differentiator between the apps is the interface created by the developer. A weather app is a good opportunity for a developer to show information in an interesting way. In the latest version of my favorite weather app — Carrot Weather (I reviewed the prior version in 2018) — the developer created building blocks so that you can customize the interface that works best for you, a great approach that earned the developer an Apple Design Award last month. But there is still room for other approaches.
Weather Strip is a new weather app that has a very nice interface. Virtually everything that you need to see is presented on a single timeline. Scroll the timeline to the right to see the forecast for the future, with the timeline dimming for the hours when the sun is set.
What makes Weather Strip unique is that the app uses layers in different colors along the same timeline to show different information in a concise matter. The main layer shows the chance of rain. (Or snow, but I’ll defer to folks who do not live in New Orleans to report on how well that works.). If there is a chance of thunderstorms, that appears in a darker blue layer on top of the blue rain layer. Next, there is a layer that shows how cloudy or sunny it is.
Atop all of those layers is a red line that shows the temperature. If the “feels like” temperature is significantly different than the actual temperature, then there is a shaded red area above or below the line to show the difference.
If you tap the “i” information button at the bottom right, the app also provides you with numbers to provide you with numbers giving the precise temperature, chance of rain, amount of rain, feel like temperature, etc. But I typically don’t find those numbers to be necessary. The size of the layers alone gives you a good sense of the current weather and the forecast from the shapes alone. But if you want to see those numbers, you can keep them on all of the time by tapping that i button.
Additional information is provided at the top of the app including a large number with the current temperature — or, if you have scrolled the timeline towards the future, the predicted temperature at that point in time. You can customize some of the information at the top.
Below the main timeline is a more condensed timeline showing you the upcoming week. Just looking at that timeline gives you a good sense of the forecast, but you can also tap on any part of it to bring the main timeline to that same location.
If there is a weather advisory, a banner appears above the timeline to alert you. Tap the banner to see more information.
Although the default is to show you the current temperature where you are located, you can tap on the map pin at the bottom center to choose a different location in the United States. (The current version of the app doesn’t have weather data for other countries.)
The app also works on the iPad, which I thought would be an advantage because of the larger screen. And you can see more of the timeline at one time on the iPad. But for my tastes, there isn’t enough use of the top and bottom of the screen in the iPad version of the app. I really like this app on the iPhone, but I’m not nearly as much of a fan on the iPad.
Weather Strip doesn’t have more sophisticated features found in other weather apps like the current radar. But I love that it takes all of the most important information so that you can see it on the iPhone all at once. And by using a timeline, it is quickly obvious whether the temperature, chance of rain, etc. is increasing or decreasing in the future. About six years ago, I reviewed an app called Weather Line that used a similar system, but that app is no longer available in the App Store and will stop working on April 1, 2022, because the company was acquired by an undisclosed buyer. If you liked Weather Line, you’ll probably like Weather Strip.
Best of all, it is easy to try the app to find out if you like it. The developer provides a generous full month to use the app for free to see if it is right for you. If you like it after a month, you can subscribe for only $3.99/year. I’ll be doing so.
Episode 10 of the In the News podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, Brett Burney and I discuss three main topics. First, we talk about Apple’s brand new MageSafe Battery Pack and share our own tips for providing your iPhone or iPad with extra power when you are away from home or the office. Second, we talk about improvements to AT&T’s unlimited data plan, and discuss why unlimited data is worth getting. Third, we talk about options for running Windows on an iPad, including Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 365. As a bonus, we also have a short discussion of some fun videos released by Apple this week.
Finally, in our In the Know segment, Brett shares a great tip for using your Apple Watch to quickly calculate the amount of a tip and the total you should pay after adding the tip. I discuss the funny Honest Trailers videos on YouTube, especially the one that they released this week: an “honest trailer” for Ted Lasso Season 1.
As we are all spending more time in the outside world instead of our homes, we are being reminded, once again, of what it is like to have an iPhone battery run low when you are not near a power outlet. In the past, Apple has sold a case for the iPhone which includes a battery such as this model for the iPhone 6 and this model for the iPhone 11. But this week, Apple introduced a much smaller device that simply attaches magnetically to the back of your iPhone and provides a charge. It is called the MagSafe Battery Pack, and California attorney David Sparks offers these thoughts on this $99 device, which works with all of the phones in the iPhone 12 line. Unlike a case that is made for a specific model of phone, hopefully (and presumably) this battery will work with future models of the iPhone as well. I haven’t seen any information on how many more hours it adds to your iPhone (which presumably will vary depending upon which model you are using), but it looks like this is a small and light battery that you could easily slip into a pocket when you are not using it. It only comes in white, but assuming that this product is successful, I would expect Apple to come out with more colors in the future. The MagSafe Battery Pack will be available starting a week from today, and you can pre-order it now. It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple gave review units of the new MagSafe battery back to select members of the press so that they can provide early reviews shortly before next Friday. Thus, I suspect we will learn more details about this product next week, but in the meantime, Juli Clover of MacRumors has some additional information on how it works. My guess is that this will be a popular product. And now, the other news of note from the past week:
In addition to that post discussing the MagSafe Battery Pack, California attorney David Sparks shared his thoughts on Spatial Audio for Apple Music, which I discussed last month (and I’m still enjoying).
A new post on the LitSoftware blog profiles California attorney Lisa Peck and explains how she uses TrialPad on her iPad to work with exhibits in a deposition and TranscriptPad to work with her deposition transcripts.
This article doesn’t relate to the iPhone or iPad, but one of my law partners recommended it to me, and it is a remarkable story of science and technology. Pam Belluck of the New York Times reports that scientists in San Francisco have learned how to allow a man who is paralyzed speak again by putting probes on the speech area of his brain and learning how to translate signals into words. Now, he can just think about speaking something and the computer says the sentence, with decent accuracy that is improving over time. You can click here to read the story, and I used a New York Times feature called “Gift Articles,” which means that, for 14 days, you can read the story using that link even if you don’t subscribe to the New York Times.
If you like the new remote for the Apple TV that I reviewed last month but you still find yourself misplacing the remote, Blair Altland of 9to5Toys reports that elgago released a new soft silicone case for the remote that includes a place to tuck an AirTag, giving you the ability to track the remote and have your iPhone point you in the right direction. It is only $14.99 on Amazon, although you also have to purchase an AirTag, which costs another $29, or $25 each when you purchase a four-pack.
Since the pandemic started, all of Apple’s Keynote events have been pre-recorded and streamed. And the quality has been excellent, down to the smallest details — even the background furniture and accessories. If you think that you may have seen something that you like, Michael Steeber of 9to5Mac spent I-cannot-even-imagine-how-many-hours to go through the last six online-only Apple events and came up with a list of “more than 100 chairs, sofas, tables, lamps, books, and accessories that fill the sets.” Impressive attention to detail
Apple TV+ also streams Peanuts movies and TV shows. Dave Mark of The Loop links to a new video from Apple that shows you how to use an iPad to draw yourself as a Peanuts character.
If you use AT&T’s $50/month unlimited data plan called Unlimited Elite, it was upgraded this week to provide no throttling, 40GB of hotspot data a month (previously 30GB), and support for 4K HBO Max streaming over 4G or 5G, as reported by Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac. AT&T has two other unlimited plans: the $40/month plan (Unlimited Extra) has 15GB of hotspot data and streams SD video, and the $35/month plan (Unlimited Starter) has no hotspot data. I use Unlimited Elite, and the other members of my family use one of the other two unlimited plans.
It may surprise you, but there are lots of ways to use Windows on an iPad. I use LogMeIn to get remote access to the PC in my office, and my law firm also uses Citrix so I can get remote access to a virtual Windows environment. And Microsoft announced this week that it will soon release Windows 365, a service that lets you run a PC in the cloud that can be accessed from a computer or an iPad. As Chris Smith of BGR reports, it isn’t yet clear what monthly cost will be, and at least at first, the product will be sold to businesses instead of individual users.
If you want to go old school, Benj Edwards of How-To Geek explains how you can run Windows 3.1 (which was released in 1992) on an iPad by downloading the iDOS app (which lets you run a version of DOS on an iPad) and then using a Windows 3.1 installer — for which you are on your own to figure out how to acquire a legal copy. I find it interesting that, in the 1990s, I had no interest at all in using Windows 3.1. (My law firm used Macs until the very early 2000s.) But now that it is possible to run it on an iPad, I’m finding myself curious to play some Solitaire and Minesweeper.
And finally, here is a funny new Apple commercial called Haystack in which a farmer shows off one of the things that you can do with an Apple Watch.
If you want to use an iPhone, iPad, or computer to build your family tree, there are a number of services you can use. In the past, I have tried Ancestry.com, but I haven’t used it in a while. Another such service is MyHeritage. MyHeritage has been in the news lately because of some fun features that allow you to add color to, and otherwise improve, old photos and a more recent ability to add animation to a portrait photograph. I’m going to discuss those features in a future post. For now, I want to just discuss using the MyHeritage app for its core feature: building a family tree. MyHeritage gave me a free account for review purposes, and I’ve spent some time over the last four months trying it out. This is a sophisticated app and service that makes it easy to build your own family tree, not just based on the information that you have, but also based on additional information that the app provides you.
Creating your family tree
To use MyHeritage, start by adding the information that you know for your family: names, birthdays, and (if appropriate) dates of death for you, your parents, your grandparents, your aunts, uncles and cousins, etc. The app makes this easy to do. Enter your own information. Then tap the big plus sign at the bottom of a person’s card in your family tree to add a father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, or other partner. Then keep adding people.
The app does a good job of understanding that relationships can be somewhat complicated. Thus, it can account for multiple spouses. half-siblings, etc. The service even accounts for things such as optionally tracking both biological parents and adoptive parents, although you have to go through a few steps to accomplish this.
Growing your family tree
At some point, there will be a limit to how much information you already know. Finding additional information on your own used to require quite a bit of work. Many years ago when my grandmother was still alive, she decided to research her family history. To do so, she took a trip to France, visited with relatives, visited churches to view original records on marriages and graveyards, etc. She enjoyed it, and it was a great excuse for a vacation with her cousins in Europe, but most of us cannot justify the time and money associated with this type of original research. And of course, there is really no limit on much time and money you could spend on this type of original research.
With MyHeritage, it is considerably easier to do the research to build your family tree. Once you have some information in MyHeritage, the app and associated website help you to add additional limbs to your family tree through a feature called Discoveries.
There are three types of Discoveries: Smart Matches, Record Matches, and Instant Discoveries. Different accounts provide access to different Discoveries, unless you get the most expensive package that allows access to everything. (I discuss pricing in more detail below.)
Smart Matches occur when there is someone else using MyHeritage who has a person in their family tree that is also on your family tree. MyHeritage says that there are billions of profiles on their system, so there is a decent chance of finding these matches. A Smart Match can sometimes be quite distant, such as one that I’m currently looking at that says “Mother’s cousin’s husband’s great-great-grandfather.” But other times it is a closer connection. By definition, you will already have at least a preliminary record for this person, so the app also shows you what new information you can potentially add about the person such as more complete date of birth or death, place of birth or burial, relatives, photos, residences, etc. And when a Smart Match provides you with additional information on relatives, that means that your tree grows even more, opening up the possibility for even more Smart Matches.
When you tap to review a match, you can then see the information in your tree on the left and the information in the matching tree on the right. If it doesn’t look like the same person, you can tap reject. But in my tests, it almost always was the right person. Once you confirm a match, you can update your entry based on the match or even, if you want, contact the person managing a family tree that overlaps with your family tree.
Another type of Discoveries match is a Record Match. This is a match from MyHeritage’s large collection of billions of records. I have seen countless different sources, things like census records, immigration records, newspapers, books, yearbooks, other family tree databases that have a connection with MyHeritage, U.S. Social Security Death Index, and many other public sources. It can be fun to look at these sources, especially when you see a handwritten record from a hundred years ago or more. And it is neat to have the ability do this type of research from your iPhone or iPad instead of having to go to a library.
The final type of match in Discoveries is an Instant Discovery. An Instant Discovery is the fastest way to grow a family tree, and thus it requires one of the more expensive plans. This feature lets you add potentially dozens of people to your family tree with a single click, adding numerous people, facts, events, photos, etc. all at once. A source citation is added to your tree so that you can see where the data came from — typically the other person’s family tree on MyHeritage. I discuss privacy below, but it is worth noting that Instant Discoveries feature will never import the details of living people. Thus, this is a way to grow the older branches of your family tree and do so quickly.
Seeing the tree
Once you have added family members that you know and supplemented that with family members that MyHeritage helps you to find, it is easy for your family tree to end up with many branches and many people. After using this app, off and on, for a few months, I now have hundreds of people identified in my family tree, representing about eight generations that go back to, on some parts of the tree, the 1700s.
When you have a large family tree, it can be difficult to present the entire tree in a way that allows you to see all of the information. This is one of the biggest drawbacks of a traditional family tree on paper, such as the one that my grandmother created from her own original research. However, MyHeritage does a nice job of displaying a family tree, especially if you are using a device with a larger screen such as the iPad app or the website.
The iPad gives you three ways to view your information. A list view just lists a bunch of names, sorted by relationship, first name, last name, or date added. I find that view most useful when I am searching for a specific person in my tree.
A Pedigree View starts with your own information card and goes straight back: your parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc. You can tap on any name to see additional information related to that person such as siblings and cousins that are not displayed on the Pedigree View.
Finally, there is a Family View, which I think is usually the most useful view. It tries to show as much information as it can at one time. When there are additional items related to a person that don’t fit, a small blue-dash-pink icon appears at the top of the card for the person, and you can tap that icon to expand the family tree information for that person. This is also a view that makes it easy to add more information about a specific person by tapping the plus sign at the bottom of the person’s card.
The app displays balloons when a person’s birthday is a few weeks away, in the past or future.
Charts and Books
While the app is great as an interactive way to explore the family tree, what if you want an easy way to share it with others or to archive it offline? The MyHeritage website has a great chart feature that can create lots of different versions of family trees, some showing more information and some showing less information, with lots of interesting templates. You can use the charts feature to create a PDF file that you can share with others, or you can order a poster if you want.
If you want a comprehensive record of all of your information, choose the option to create a book. Although called a “book” it is really just a huge, organized PDF file — although if you wanted to print it out as a book, you certainly could. The book includes detailed looked at each set of branches of your family tree, a list of each generation, a listing of all of the sources used (public records, family trees created by others, etc.), and an index of all of the places referenced in your family tree. There is also an index of dates which is particularly interesting. Pick a year and you can see who was born, died, married, moved to a new residence, etc. during that year. And finally there is a complete index to all of the individuals named. The book is seriously impressive.
Privacy
How much information on your tree do you want to share with others? For all of us, there are people out there who are complete strangers but with whom we share some family connection, however attenuated. Although I don’t believe that you can control this in the iPhone or iPad app, the MyHeritage website offers lots of different privacy options so that you can control what, if anything, strangers can see from your family tree.
The service automatically provides additional privacy protection for people who are still alive, sometimes requiring you to ask the custodian of that information for permission before adding it to your tree. For people who are deceased, you can often get more information.
Pricing
There are many different pricing tiers for MyHeritage. You can start with a free account, which allows you to create a family tree with up to 250 people on it. This is a great way to start and get a feel for how the app works. And if you just want to keep track of a relatively small family tree, this works well.
To take advantage of advanced features, including the Discoveries, you need a paid subscription. The least expensive option is the Premium Plan which costs $129/year ($89 for the first year) and gives you up to 2,500 people on your family tree and adds the Smart Matches feature along with other features. The PremiumPlus Plan is $209/year ($149 in the first year) and adds more features to the Premium Plan such as Instant Discoveries and an unlimited family tree size. For $189/year ($129 in the first year) you can get access to the Data plan with billions of historical records plus Record Matches. If you want all of the features of the PremiumPlus plan and also want the historical records in the Data plan, then you should get the Complete Plan for $299/year ($199 in the first year) that gives you everything offered in all of the other plans. When MyHeritage gave me a free account for a limited time so that I could write this review, the company gave me the Complete Plan, so that is how I’ve been able to test all of the different features.
You need a paid plan to take full advantage of all that MyHeritage offers, but even if you just pay for one year of a subscription, that would be more than enough time to do a ton of research. When you are finished, you can create some charts or books as a permanent record. If you don’t pay to renew a subscription, the site keeps your data and allows you to downgrade back to a free Basic subscription, but if you have more than 250 people on your family tree you won’t be able to add more people. You can export your family tree in GEDCOM format, an open specification for exchanging genealogical data between different genealogy software that was developed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (You can also import in GEDCOM format.)
Support
The MyHeritage website features lots of help files including many videos to help you with every aspect of using the program. If you want to go deep on your family tree, you can get a ton of tips for doing research and managing your information. All of the paid plans also offer customer support, but I didn’t have a reason to test that.
The more that I used this service, the more that I realized how sophisticated it is. If you want to dive deep into exploring your family history, there is a ton of information that you can access in this app, and to do so you should take advantage of the extensive help files and videos.
Fun with photographs
As noted above, I’m going to write a separate post on some of the newest features in MyHeritage which allow you to do some interesting things with photographs of your ancestors. I’ll add a link here when that review is posted.
Conclusion
MyHeritage is a great service if you want to track and explore your family tree. For many of the most common features that you would use, the iPad or iPhone app is all that you need. When you want to use more advanced features, you can use the MyHeritage website. And fortunately, you can get started for free to get a sense of what the service has to offer. To grow your family tree by going beyond the information that you already know, you’ll want to purchase one of the subscription plans for at least one year, and fortunately, each plan is less expensive in the first year. And if you decide that you want to devote a lot of time to researching your family tree, MyHeritage gives you access to a ton of historical resources that you can explore.
Click here to get MyHeritage for iPad or iPhone (free):
