One of the nice things about the Summer is that sometimes things slow down enough that you can take a break and watch some good things on TV. Apple TV+ has lots of good things on right now and even more coming out soon. I'm currently enjoying Dark Matter and Trying. I haven't even started watching Presumed Innocent yet, but it is getting good reviews, and it has special appeal for me because I loved reading the book and then watching the movie just before I started law school. I'm also interested in two movies being released soon by Apple TV+: Fly Me to the Moon starring Scarlett Johansson, which is a comedy-drama about NASA in the 1960s, and Wolfs, an action-comedy starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt. But those are both going to the theater first, and there is no current release date for the home theater. Fortunately, other promising shows are coming to the TV soon, and Macworld has a helpful page devoted to upcoming Apple TV+ shows. Here are some that I am looking forward to that have release dates. July 19: Lady in the Lake (starring Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram). July 24: Time Bandits (based on the quirky movie of the 1980s, stars Lisa Kudrow, created by and appearances by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi). July 31: Women in Blue (Mexico's first female police force). August 9: The Instigators (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck). August 14: Bad Monkey (produced by Bill Lawrence, starring Vince Vaughn). Two others that look interesting and that will come out later this year: (1) Sept. 4: Slow Horses Season 4 and (2) Oct. 11: Disclaimer (Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline). That could be a whole lot of great things to watch on TV. And now, here is the news of notes from the past week.
- Nelson Aguilar of CNet has a list of 22 things that you might want to change in the iPhone Settings app. You probably know about many of these, but I doubt that you know about all of them.
- Cory Bohon of Gadget Hacks shares tips for doing more with iPhone keyboard.
- Chance Miller of 9to5Mac notes that a new feature coming to Apple Maps in iOS 18 is a "search here" button. That sounds useful.
- iPadOS 18 will add support for formatting external drives, according to Federico Viticci of MacStories. Is that a feature that most people need? Probably not, but it is an example of an advanced iPad feature, and I love seeing the iPad get more powerful. I often use my iPad to get work done when I don't have a computer nearby, and it is frustrating to hit the limits of an iPad when it ought to be able to do a task that a computer can do.
- Apple is rolling out a firmware update for all AirPods. There is nothing that you need to do, eventually, it will install on its own, but according to Chance Miller of 9to5Mac, it fixes a Bluetooth vulnerability that a hacker could use to gain access to your AirPods (or Beats headphones). Yikes. If you want to determine if your model is updated yet, go to the Settings app on your iPhone -> Bluetooth -> click the info button next to your AirPods / AirPods Pro -> Version to learn what firmware version number you are running. Miller's post has a list of all of the latest versions. For example, for my AirPods Pro (2nd generation), the new version is 6F8.
- If your Apple Watch is having difficulty detecting your pulse or other vitals, take a look to see if you happen to have a tattoo on your arm. If you do, it can interfere with the sensors, and you may have to remove the tattoo as explained in this post by Malcolm Owen for AppleInsider.
- One day, Apple may give us the ability to purchase and install custom watch faces. But until that day comes, you need to customize the limited faces provided by Apple if you want a different look. I find that using the Stripes fact is one way to change the look; I have a version of Stripes with Green and White that I wear to support my daughter's high school basketball team, a version with Purple, Green, and Gold that I wear for Mardi Gras, etc. Zac Hall of 9to5Mac shows a way to create a very minimal watch face using the Photos face and a black image as the photo.
- Dan Moren of Six Colors speculates on what changes Apple might make to the next device that runs visionOS.
- There is currently no native YouTube app for the Apple Vision Pro, but Juno is a $5 third-party app that tries to be the next best thing. The app was updated yesterday to support 360º videos on YouTube, as reported by Flilpe Espósito of 9to5Mac. The good news is that there are lots of 360º videos that you can watch on YouTube, so this greatly increases the amount of 3D immersive content for the Vision Pro. The bad news is that the stuff on YouTube doesn't seem to be very good. I don't just mean the critical quality of the videos is lacking, although there is a lot of that. I mean the technical quality. The videos on YouTube are noticeably inferior to the 8K immersive videos released by Apple and, more recently, Disney/Marvel. Even when a video surrounds you, that grainy quality removes any sense that you are really there. Having said that, there are still some interesting things to watch if you want to try. Here are two to start with. (1) Teleportaled is a very short Sci-Fi comedy that is cute. (2) This is a view from the cockpit of a Swiss Air Force fighter jet. Note that even if you don't have a Vision Pro you can click on those links and watch a 2D video, and you can click and drag to change your view, but that completely removes you from the feeling of 3D.
- Apple TV+ is expanding from movies and TV shows to original podcasts with a show called My Divo premiering on July 1, 2024, as noted in this press release.
- And finally, one of the features of the next version of CarPlay is that the interface can control all aspects of a car. The folks at Blackbox Infinite played around with the software to see if they could imitate some of the most iconic car dashboards of all time, and they did an amazing job. It makes me think that this version of CarPlay could be really cool. Now we just need cars that support it. You can view their work on this webpage and in this video: