512 Pixels

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Beta builds of Premiere Pro include support for Apple’s Afterburner accelerator card, Adobe told Premiere Pro users earlier this week. Premiere Pro and After Effects were recently updated with native ProRES RAW support.

The Apple Afterburner is a ProRes and ProRes RAW accelerator card that is an optional add-on accessory available in the 2019 Mac Pro. It supports playback of up to 3 streams of 8K Pro-Res RAW or 12 streams of 4K ProRes RAW.

Adobe says that Premiere Pro supports decode acceleration of ProRes 4444 and 422 codecs using the Afterburner card, but ProRES RAW acceleration through the Afterburner card is not supported at this time.

Good news for those in the Adobe camp.

This time on Flashback:

Microsoft was late to the smartphone party, and its first entrance, the Kin, was designed for teens and young adults who didn’t want or need an iPhone, Android phone or Blackberry. The only problem? That audience didn’t really exist.

Oh, Microsoft…

I am glad that Zac Hall has undertaken this project, and am utterly disappointed in how many states aren’t going to take part of this program — including my home state of Tennessee.

If we lived in a country that actually worked, maybe we could have a federally-built and support app to take advantage of the work that Apple and Google are doing, but … uhhh…

Monica Chin, at The Verge:

Nick Bryner, a high school senior in Los Angeles, had just completed his AP English Literature and Composition test last week. But when he snapped a photo of a written answer with his iPhone and attempted to upload it to the testing portal, it stopped responding.

The website got stuck on the loading screen until Bryner’s time ran out. Bryner failed the test. He’s retaking it in a few weeks.

Bryner is among the many high school students around the country who completed Advanced Placement tests online last week but were unable to submit them at the end. The culprit: image formats.

My kids — like millions of others — finished out their spring semester at home. Even though they are in elementary school, I’ve been shocked at how bad a lot of education-focused applications and websites are. If kids have to do more schoolwork at home in the future, these tools have to get better, and fast.

David is back with another new Field Guide, this time covering the world of Apple’s Photos app and its accompanying iCloud features. I’ve spent some time in the course, and as always, it is fantastic. The next episode of Mac Power Users will cover some of this as well, so look for that on Sunday.

Pat Dryburgh:

I wasn’t surprised to find that there is currently only one Emoji that includes a visible medical face mask. However, I was sad to see that the expression on the faces of every version of this Emoji looked rather gloomy.

No doubt when this emoji was first introduced, face masks in Western society were primarily worn by professionals or those under medical care. However, we have since joined our brothers and sisters in places where medical face masks are worn by everyone and as some people have pointed out, this makes communicating emotions through facial expressions really tough.

Given this, I think we need more expressive face-mask Emojis. I think a suite of Emojis expressing alternate emotions through a face mask would allow us a small opportunity to show solidarity with one another as we brave this new world.

I think this is a great idea.

This week on Connected:

Follow-up. Microsoft has reinvented OpenDoc. A conversation about watchOS 7. Follow-up. Microsoft has reinvented OpenDoc. A conversation about watchOS 7. Follow-up. OpenDoc. watchOS 7. Are you getting it? These are not three separate episodes … this is one episode, and we’re calling it “Another Italian Interjected.”

Also: Myke had an accident, I had to stop the show for a few minutes and Federico learned about a feature on the Apple Watch.

My thanks to our sponsors:

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Nick Statt at The Verge:

AT&T’s actual 5G network is rolling out to major parts of the US this year, but the company’s fake 5G network — which it calls “5G Evolution” and shortens to “5G E” when it appears in the corner of smartphones — has remained the subject of controversy for the last two years.

Now, the carrier has decided that it will continue the charade even after the National Advertising Review Board (NARB) recommended it cease using the misleading term as well as the phrase ”5G Evolution, The First Step to 5G,” according to telecom news site Light Reading. What’s AT&T’s argument? Well, according to the report, AT&T says it will comply with the recommendation as it applies to advertising, like marketing campaigns and branding, but that the logo doesn’t qualify as such and therefore can stay.

Why am I not surprised that AT&T doesn’t view the space on everyone’s phone as an ad?

This week on Liftoff:

The Artemis Accords have been unveiled, but will their adoption be hurt by their rollout? Could Starship be more useful as a refueling station than a lander? Jason and Stephen get into these questions and more this fortnight.

The first crewed launch from U.S. soil is set to take place next week. Busy times in space.

My thanks to our sponsor:

• Tuparev Technologies: Introducing StarBrush: Modern astronomical imaging tool for everyone.

iJustine has upgraded her Mac Pro with 1.5 TB of RAM, an OWC Accelsior 4M2 drive and a set of wheels. This is the first installation video I’ve seen of the wheels, and it looks a lot easier than I expected to put them on:

While I don’t have much of an interest in the wheels, I keep eyeballing my internal storage as it slowly fills up. That OWC drive is expensive, and while I really don’t want to put 3.5-inch hard drives in this machine for archival storage, I may have to sooner or later.

Apple Support:

Here are the steps for uninstalling QuickTime for Windows when using Windows 95.

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