A TECHNICAL

Apple just announced its latest MacBook. It’s tiny. It makes the Macbook Air look like a Dell Inspiron circa 2002. But hopefully you’re not one of those jerks that actually uses the ports on the side of your computer. This MacBook only has a single USB-C and it does everything from charging, to sending video out and transporting data. It’s the only port on the computer meaning owners cannot charge the computer and an iPhone at the same time. It’s not possible to output video to a monitor and input data from an external drive — at least not without a hub. This single port was likely the byproduct of Apple’s quest to make the thinnest MacBook possible. Ports take a lot of room. Thanks to their physical structure, the female jack cannot be made that much smaller. This isn’t the first time Apple threw out industry standards. In 1998 Apple shocked the industry and didn’t include a floppy drive or serial ports in the iMac G3. Instead Apple included a CD-ROM an...

Quoting from the site techcrunch Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban One thing that had been rumored for inclusion in iOS 8 that wasn’t announced on stage was a new trick for the iPad that would let it run two apps side-by-side concurrently. The feature was  first reported by Mark Gurman  at 9to5Mac as one in a series of articles revealing upcoming features of the then-secret beta, and claimed that you’d be able to not only run two apps next to each other, but also move data from one to the other. It wasn’t unveiled, but developer Steve Troughton-Smith has uncovered code that suggest it was at least in development. Steve T-S   @ stroughtonsmith Follow So… just in case there was any doubt left… iOS 8’s SpringBoard has code to run two apps side-by-side. 1/4 size, 1/2 size, or 3/4 size The code found by Troughton-Smith allows two apps to run side-by-side in different proportions, taking up a quarter of the screen vs. three-quarters for the other active app, o...

Quoting from the site techcrunch Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban Apple’s  7-for-1 split went live  today, and its share price dipped under the $100 mark, as the technology company greatly increased its share count. The market is up today, but Apple has picked up more than twice the bounce that the NASDAQ has received, climbing north of 1 percent. It’s not a massive rally, but no one anticipated more. Apple’s split is noteworthy given its massive scale; the company is the most valuable public one in the world, with a market capitalization of around $565 billion. So, Apple’s 1 percent lift today is worth north of $5 billion. Staggering figures aside, Apple’s share price is now a modest $93.70, making it a prime target for inclusion in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), a price-weighted exchange. Previously, Apple’s share price made it all but impossible to include given the exchange’s weighting procedure. Call it the Berkshire problem, ...

Quoting from the site techcrunch  Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban Apple has begun to crack down on tools that app developers use to monetize and grow their applications, including incentivized video viewing and rewarded social sharing, as well as discovery tools that allow users to find apps inside the games they’re already playing. The move will have a significant impact on the app industry as a whole, and will serve as something of a “reset” in terms of how apps can achieve growth and scale. With the introduction of  the revamped iOS App Store in iOS 8,  Apple revealed a number of changes to the app discovery process, with new features that help users find apps by trending keywords, by category and subcategory, by related search terms, and more. Developers can even promote their apps in “bundles.” But as these changes indicate, what the company didn’t reveal is that it’s not only trying to reinvent app discovery with iOS 8; it’s also t...

Quoting from the site techcrunch Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban Apple has enabled MAC address randomization in iOS 8 (from  Frederic Jacobs  via HackerNews ), which means it’s harder for marketers to keep track of your comings and goings in or around public Wi-Fi networks. In the updated software, while your iPhone is scanning for Wi-Fi networks, it assigns a “random, locally administered” MAC address, which is typically a constant, unique identifier attached to your phone’s wireless network interface. Some other changes it has implemented have made it easier for those promoting commerce activity on the iPhone, as I discussed in a column this weekend, but this option helps curtail some of the more surreptitious marketing activity, as opposed to stuff where a customer has displayed a direct intent to want to fork over some cash. MAC addresses can help retailers and others track return visits and build a shopper profile, by linking in-store visits to purchases and oth...

Quoting from the site techcrunch  Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban Apple’s various additions to iOS 8 mean we’re going to see a big shift come September, in terms of what’s available to both consumers and developers, but the group that should be most excited might be marketers and others trying to get users buying things on and with their devices. A few of the new features in iOS 8 make it much easier to shop on and with your iPhone, and since Apple already has a mobile user base that’s shown its willingness to spend, that’s very big news. One such feature was uncovered through the beta late last week: with iOS 8, the  iPhone’s camera can snap pics of credit cards  to automatically populate credit card information fields in Safari. That means no more arduous copying out of your card number, cardholder name and expiration date every time you want to complete a transaction online – instead it’s a single-click thanks to optical character recognition, and it works au...