512 Pixels

This week on Mac Power Users:

Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge joins David and Stephen to talk about emoji, how they’re made and why they’ve found such huge success. Then, he explains how tech needs change when one lives on a boat.

Jeremy is one of my favorite people on the Internet, and it was a lot of fun to hear how he runs his business.

My thanks to this week’s sponsors:

• TextExpander from Smile: Get 20% off with this link and type more with less effort! Expand short abbreviations into longer bits of text, even fill-ins, with TextExpander from Smile.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.

During a recent recording of Connected, it was suggested that I make a video trying to identify Apple dongles by touch. Ask and you shall receive, as the kids say:

My thanks to SoundSource for sponsoring the site this week. It’s sound control so good, it ought to be built into macOS. 512 Pixel readers save 20% with coupon code 512XX!

Eric Rosenbaum, writing at CNBC:

Apple’s iPhone revenue declined in the first quarter 2020, but a big jump in services revenue and more than $10 billion from its wearables category highlight newer sources of growth. The Covid-19 pandemic hurt the quarterly earnings overall, but Apple CEO Tim Cook indicated that more recent sales numbers provide reason for optimism, and at least one Apple business expects the coronavirus to accelerate rather than hinder its near-term success.

It’s an Apple business most people don’t know much about, if they know it at all: Claris, which sells the low-code application development software called FileMaker.

“There is a massive opportunity for low code to help in the Covid-19 situation,” said Claris CEO Brad Freitag, who took the reins at the company last year and rebranded what had long been known as FileMaker under the Claris name.

No doubt that tools like FileMaker can be used to rapidly build solutions for hospitals, which this article points out, but I’m not sure COVID-19 is going to move the needle for the business in a major way.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2020 second quarter ended March 28, 2020. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $58.3 billion, an increase of 1 percent from the year-ago quarter, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.55, up 4 percent. International sales accounted for 62 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

“Despite COVID-19’s unprecedented global impact, we’re proud to report that Apple grew for the quarter, driven by an all-time record in Services and a quarterly record for Wearables,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “In this difficult environment, our users are depending on Apple products in renewed ways to stay connected, informed, creative, and productive. We feel motivated and inspired to not only keep meeting these needs in innovative ways, but to continue giving back to support the global response, from the tens of millions of face masks and custom-built face shields we’ve sent to medical professionals around the world, to the millions we’ve donated to organizations like Global Citizen and America’s Food Fund.”

Snell has charts of the results. Apple did not offer guidance for the next quarter.

This week on the show:

The trio gives a math lesson before follow-up on the Magic Keyboard and iPhone SE. Then, our plans for WWDC.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• Sanebox: Clean up your inbox in minutes. Sign up for a two-week free trial and a $25 credit.
• Pingdom: Start monitoring your website performance and availability today, and get instant alerts when an outage occurs or a site transaction fails. Use offer code CONNECTED to get 30% off. Offer expires on January 31, 2021.
• StoryWorth: Record your family stories. Get $10 off your first purchase.

Oleksandr Kosovan, the CEO of MacPaw, sharing the news that CleanMyMac X is now on the Mac App Store:

In 2018, CleanMyMac X switched to a subscription model — a ubiquitous way of getting apps on the Mac App Store. The same year (2018), Apple significantly improved the store itself with a new design and curated content. The fact that the Mac App Store became much better and that it supported subscriptions, made us work on building CleanMyMac X for the Mac App Store.

As you would imagine, there are some differences between the App Store and non-App Store version, but if you prefer the App Store for purchasing Mac apps, this is good news.

Ryan Christoffel has the details, but I am really liking what I’ve seen of this so far.

Apple Support:

Press the power button on the front on the iMac computer instead.

You can use the Apple USB Keyboard with all iMac computers, but the circuitry that enables the keyboard’s Power button is not present on the models listed above. Therefore, pressing the Power button on the keyboard will have no effect.

Then, there’s this gem:

The parenthetical product descriptions (Summer 2000) and (Summer 2001) refer to the summer of the Northern Hemisphere.

Good to know, Apple.

Big Relay FM news today:

Backstage is a members-only podcast from Relay FM. Each month, co-founders Myke Hurley and Stephen Hackett will give a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to run the network, and share their knowledge to help you create a podcast or start a creative project.

Backstage is published in our normal Members Only feed, but we’ve made the first episode available for everyone. If you aren’t a member, now’s the time to sign up!

SoundSource gives you powerful control over all the audio on your Mac, right from your menu bar. Get per-application volume controls that let you mute your browser, or send music to one set of speakers and everything else to another. Improve sound quality with built-in effects, and support for Audio Unit plugins as well. Fast device access puts all the settings your Mac’s audio devices are just a click away.

One more thing … have a DisplayPort or HDMI device that fails to offer volume adjustment? SoundSource can help there too. It gives those devices a proper volume slider, and the Super Volume Keys feature makes your keyboard volume controls work as well. Neat!

Check out SoundSource today, with a free trial! Rogue Amoeba has extended their April sale - through May 15th, 512 Pixels readers can save 20% with coupon code 512XX.

It probably shouldn’t be a surprise how much the new iPhone SE and 8 have in common, but iFixit shows just how many parts between the two phones are interchangeable — including the camera module.