Apple News

[Administrator]

NowGaming on Apple TV: Which games should I install first?
Here at AppAdvice, we want to provide you with the best information we can on making the most of your new Apple TV. That’s why we’ve published an app for the set-top box, NowGaming, to help you wade through all of the choices available on the tvOS App Store. In this column, I’ll look at NowGaming’s lists of games and help you narrow down the choices even further by giving you my take on the titles. This week, I’ll be looking at the “First Games to Install” lineup.

What games are on the list?

You’ll find some familiar titles, as well as some that are unique to the Apple TV. Before we dive into my favorites, here’s the complete list.

Crossy Road – Endless Arcade Hopper, Free
Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions, $9.99
Alto’s Adventure, $2.99
Pac-Man 256 – Endless Arcade Maze, Free
Song Pop Party, Free
Galaxy on Fire: Manticore Rising, $5.99
Beat Sports, $9.99
League Star Bowling, $1.99
Hit Tennis 3, Free
Rayman Adventures, Free
Now, onto my favorites from this list.

Save the Incrediballs

Rayman Adventures is probably my favorite of the first round of games that arrived on Apple TV. Initially available only on the set-top box, you can now play along with Rayman and his friends on your iOS devices, too. This free title challenges you to break through items and beat down or avoid bad guys in an effort to rescue the Teensies and locate the ancient eggs crucial to the survival of the Sacred Tree. Rayman Adventures provides you with console-like entertainment on your Apple TV, making it a perfect example of what the set-top box is capable of.

Snowboard to save llamas

The village’s llamas have escaped, and it’s up to Alto to save them. Alto’s Adventure has been a favorite on the iPhone and iPad, and it’s even bigger and better on Apple TV. Not only are you on a quest to rescue the llamas, but you’ve got a showboat streak to you, too. You’ll score extra points for grinding along walls and wires, pulling off backflips, and performing other snowboarding stunts. It’s fast-paced, and the graphics are beautifully rendered.

Pac-Man 256

When it first arrived on iOS, Pac-Man 256 immediately caught my eye. After all, Pac-Man really lit me up on arcade games in my youth, and I would spend hours chasing Pac Dots and trying to steer clear of the ghosts. This new brand of the game features an ever-encroaching glitch that can end your career prematurely, and it adds a definite element of excitement to an already great game. Pac-Man 256 is perfectly suited to the big screen, and is definitely a must-have for Apple TV gaming fun.

League Star Bowling

I love bowling, but just can’t afford to go out and do it for real as much as I would like. The real-world controls of League Star Bowling offer me an excellent compromise, bringing the lanes straight into my living room. The control scheme is easy to learn, but the finer points like spin control are definitely more challenging to master. League Star Bowling is high on my list of games to play either alone or with friends, and I certainly recommend it as a perfect evening entertainment choice.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Frogger was one of my all-time favorite arcade games as a teenager, and Crossy Road perfectly captures the flavor of that classic. The pixellated graphics are perfectly retro, and the action gets fast and furious. Couple that with hilarious sounds and a vast array of characters to help cross the road, and you have a title that’s truly worthy of the big screen television.

That’s it for this week’s edition of NowGaming. Tune in again next week when I look at some of the best games for use with an optional Bluetooth controller.

[Administrator]

Apple Wants Congress to Take on iPhone Encryption Debate

Apple CEO Tim Cook wants the U.S. government to withdraw its iPhone encryption demands and, instead, have Congress form a panel to discuss the balance of national security and privacy.
In a memo to Apple employees, obtained by Engadget, Cook addressed the company’s plans to challenge a federal court order to help the FBI unlock the iPhone of one of the attackers who carried out the Dec. 2 terrorist attack that killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif. The order to help the FBI, which came last Tuesday, tells Apple it must provide “reasonable technical assistance” to law enforcement in the recovery of data from the iPhone 5c. The FBI has been unable to access the device’s encrypted content.
Cook said he is hopeful the battle can leave the courts and, instead, go to Capitol Hill.
“Apple is a uniquely American company. It does not feel right to be on the opposite side of the government in a case centering on the freedoms and liberties that government is meant to protect,” he wrote. “Our country has always been strongest when we come together. We feel the best way forward would be for the government to withdraw its demands under the All Writs Act and, as some in Congress have proposed, form a commission or other panel of experts on intelligence, technology and civil liberties to discuss the implications for law enforcement, national security, privacy and personal freedoms. Apple would gladly participate in such an effort.”
Apple has also addressed the issue on its questions and answers page as a followup to the open letter he penned last week to explain the company’s stance.

Cook’s memo and the updated FAQ come at the same time as an op-ed piece, published via Lawfare, by FBI director James Comey.
In the post, Comey subtly slammed Apple for its stance.
“Although this case is about the innocents attacked in San Bernardino, it does highlight that we have awesome new technology that creates a serious tension between two values we all treasure: privacy and safety,” Comey wrote. “That tension should not be resolved by corporations that sell stuff for a living. It also should not be resolved by the FBI, which investigates for a living. It should be resolved by the American people deciding how we want to govern ourselves in a world we have never seen before. We shouldn’t drift to a place—or be pushed to a place by the loudest voices—because finding the right place, the right balance, will matter to every American for a very long time.”
Comey also maintained that the FBI’s request is narrow in its scope and said it would not affect the privacy of anyone other than the owner of the particular phone it hopes to access.
“The relief we seek is limited and its value increasingly obsolete because the technology continues to evolve,” he wrote. “We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That’s it. We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land. I hope thoughtful people will take the time to understand that. Maybe the phone holds the clue to finding more terrorists. Maybe it doesn’t. But we can’t look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don’t follow this lead.”
Apple, however, is not buying Comey’s story. In its updated Q&A page, the tech firm said the FBI’s request has two dangerous implications.
“First, the government would have us write an entirely new operating system for their use,” the page reads. “They are asking Apple to remove security features and add a new ability to the operating system to attack iPhone encryption, allowing a passcode to be input electronically. This would make it easier to unlock an iPhone by ‘brute force,’ trying thousands or millions of combinations with the speed of a modern computer… The passcode lock and requirement for manual entry of the passcode are at the heart of the safeguards we have built in to iOS. It would be wrong to intentionally weaken our products with a government-ordered backdoor. If we lose control of our data, we put both our privacy and our safety at risk.”
Apple also said the order would “set a legal precedent that would expand the powers of the government and we simply don’t know where that would lead us.”
A number of other tech firms and privacy advocates have sided with Apple on the matter, but it is still anyone’s guess as to how it will all play out.

[Administrator]

The CW network releases cable subscription-free Apple TV app

US television network The CW is making the jump into set-top box streaming in a way that can only be described as a cord cutter’s dream come true: with no requirement for a cable subscription. In addition to updating its iOS app, the network has released a new app for the fourth-gen Apple TV that allows viewers to watch The CW — including brand-new episodes of its shows — for free with no login or authentication of a cable subscription.

The network’s iOS app has already been a rare example of such ease of use, offering unlimited and free access to its shows on the iPhone and iPad, and with the new update to version 2.13.1365 it becomes even more useful. The app now features support for both Apple’s AirPlay and Google’s Chromecast, so users can stream video to their TV set even without the latest Apple TV model.

For those that do have the fourth-gen Apple TV, they don’t even need to worry about using AirPlay. Just download The CW app and instantly start watching the latest episodes of the network’s shows, including Supergirl, The Flash, Jane The Virgin, Arrow, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, iZombie, Supernatural, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The 100, Vampire Diaries, Reign, and The Originals.

It’s worth noting that The CW’s app — both on iOS and Apple TV — doesn’t offer access to a show’s entire archive, only the five most recent episodes, so don’t expect to be able to binge watch every season of Supernatural ? la Netflix style. Also, since there’s no cable or subscription requirement, the shows are ad-supported, but that’s a small price to pay for cord cutters everywhere.

SOURCE App Store

[Administrator]

Apple published a surprising amount of detail about how the HomePod works
Machine learning is a big focus at Apple right now—a blog post explains why.

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The post discusses working in a far-field setting where users are calling on Siri from any number of locations around the room relative to the HomePod's location. The premise is essentially that making Siri work on the HomePod is harder than on the iPhone for that reason. The device must compete with loud music playback from itself.
Apple addresses these issues with multiple microphones along with machine learning methods—specifically:

Mask-based multichannel filtering using deep learning to remove echo and background noise
Unsupervised learning to separate simultaneous sound sources and trigger-phrase based stream selection to eliminate interfering speech

Apple's teams write that "speech enhancement performance has improved substantially due to deep learning."

This new post is basically an article meant to establish Apple as a leader in the space, which the company is in some ways but not others. The post covers a wide range of topics, like echo cancellation and suppression, mask-based noise reduction, and deep-learning based streamer selection, among other things. There is a considerable amount of technical and mathematical detail, as it's written like an academic paper with detailed citations. We won't recap it all here—it's a lot—but give it a read if you're interested in a fairly deep dive on the techniques being used at Apple (and other tech companies, although specific approaches do vary).

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As noted previously, Apple has made machine learning a major focus of its work over the past couple of years. The Neural Engine on the iPhone's A12 and the iPad Pro's A12X chip is many times more powerful than what was included in previous Apple devices, and it's much more powerful than machine learning silicon in competing SoCs.

We hear about "machine learning" so much in tech product marketing pitches that it starts to sound like a catch-all that doesn't mean a lot to the user, so pieces like this can be helpful for context even if they're fundamentally promotional. Google has generally done a good job using its blogs to give users and partners a deeper understanding; here, Apple is doing the same.
For now, Amazon and Google are the market leaders when it comes to digital assistant technology. Apple has some catching up to do with Siri, but the approaches behind these competitors are not the same, so comparisons aren't as easy as they could be. Most relevant for users, Apple focuses on doing machine learning tasks on the local machine (either the user's, or the application or feature developer's) not in the cloud. But Apple's Core ML API does allow developers to tap into outside cloud networks, and Android devices also do local processing, like with photos, but the emphasis is different.
The HomePod smart speaker launched early this year. In our review, we found its sound quality to be outstanding and Siri to be responsive, but the lack of on-device Spotify support, the price, and other limitations of Siri as compared to Amazon's Alexa (found in the Sonos One and many other smart speakers) prevented us from making an unequivocal recommendation. Apple has not specifically shared individual unit sales of the HomePod in its quarterly earnings reports.