512 Pixels

Shawn C. Steiner at B&H, writing about Canon’s newest camera:

It’s mirrorless. It’s full frame. It has a new mount, of course. The RF mount is Canon’s latest, and its engineers have created a versatile design with a 20mm flange distance and 54mm inner diameter, both of which will lead to more advanced optics and some brilliant new lenses.

If I were still living the Canon life, this would be a great upgrade from something like the 70D that I used to carry, but I’m really happy with my Sony a7R II. Sony is simply killing it in this space, and even with the EOS R, Canon has some catching up to do.

Dani Deahl, The Verge:

Evernote is currently offering a sale on its Premium membership, slashing its yearly subscription price from $70 down to a much more reasonable $42. The company offered the same deal earlier this year. If you’re interested in grabbing the deal, it’s available now on Evernote’s site. It only applies if you pay one lump sum for the annual subscription.

When Evernote drastically raised it prices, many people I know finally left the service. It was just one more blow against an application that feels like it’s on the ropes. Then there is this news, as reported by Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch:

TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that in the last month, Evernote lost several of its most senior executives, including its CTO Anirban Kundu, CFO Vincent Toolan, CPO Erik Wrobel and head of HR Michelle Wagner beyond the usual attrition of engineers and designers.

[…]

A person who tipped TechCrunch off to the executive departures gave a slightly more blunt and uncharitable spin on the state of affairs. “Evernote is in a death spiral,” the tipster claimed. “Paid user growth and active users have been flat for the last six years and their enterprise product offering has not caught on.”

If this is an accurate description, it would pose a tough challenge for the company as it eyes up another round of funding.

I used Evernote for many, many years, including in a team setting at a former job. However, when Apple’s Notes app got its big overhaul, I switched to it and haven’t looked back. Clearly I’m not alone in moving to an alternative.

Ellie Powers and Chris Beckmann, writing on the Google Chrome blog about the browser’s new look:

You can see it across all platforms—desktop, Android, and iOS—where you’ll notice more rounded shapes, new icons and a new color palette. These updates have a simpler look and will (hopefully) boost your productivity. Take tabs, for instance. Are you a secret tab-hoarder? No judgment. We changed the shape of our tabs so that the website icons are easier to see, which makes it easier to navigate across lots of tabs. On mobile, we’ve made a number of changes to help you browse faster, including moving the toolbar to the bottom on iOS, so it’s easy to reach. And across Chrome, we simplified the prompts, menus, and even the URLs in your address bar.

It feels noticeably out of place on macOS, but so did Chrome’s old look.

Apple Support, from 1995:

In the early days of the Macintosh operating system, new objects like icons and windows had to be stored and managed somewhere by the operating system. Information such as the bit mapped representation of the icon picture to display and the association of documents to the application that created them was saved in a database. This file was called “Desktop” and was an invisible file at the top level of every diskette. Information was placed in this file by the action of the Finder making calls to the Desktop Manager. The Desktop Manager, in turn, made calls to the Resource Manager, creating resource items within the Desktop file.

When hard drives came into use on the Macintosh and the file system was enhanced with real folders and a hierarchical organization. This became known as the Hierarchical File System (HFS). The Desktop file maintained the same information as before, but became much larger in size since hard drives held many more files and documents.

AppleShare File Servers added the ability for the Macintosh to share larger and larger hard drives. The fast access needs of the file servers began to strain the capabilities of the Resource Manager to maintain the Desktop database. A new database organization was designed for use by the Desktop Manager for use on AppleShare 2.0.x servers. This new Desktop database consisted of two invisible files called “Desktop DB” and “Desktop DF”.

This week on Ungeniused:

From its origins after The Civil War to its mysterious ingredient list, we tackle all the Coca-Cola questions that have bubbled up since our previous episode.

My thanks to our sponsor:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code UNGENIUSED at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.

Samuel Axon at Ars Technica:

It will deliver an improvement in graphics performance for most use cases if you’re using any current Apple machine but the iMac Pro or the top-spec 27-inch iMac. But with no upgrade potential, it’s a tough sell for almost everyone. The whole point of an eGPU enclosure for many prospective buyers is to provide an upgrade path for the GPU you’re using with your MacBook Pro or iMac.

This is one area where Apple’s usual approach just doesn’t make any sense. Most users who would be drawn to an external enclosure want a beefier GPU than this, and a lot of them want upgradeability. The discrete GPUs in the MacBook Pro and iMac are good enough for all consumer uses except heavy-duty professional graphics work and triple-A gaming. An eGPU enclosure should solve for those cases, but this one just doesn’t.

If I still lived that MacBook Pro + external display life, I’d be looking at an eGPU, but probably not this one.

It’s nice that they are marking the upcoming 10th anniversary of 512 Pixels with an event the same day. gets phone call

Oh, just new iPhones.

Stephen Nellis at Reuters reports that Apple has purchased Akonia Holographics, a Colorado company that has done work on lenses for AR glasses:

Akonia said its display technology allows for “thin, transparent smart glass lenses that display vibrant, full-color, wide field-of-view images.” The firm has a portfolio of more than 200 patents related to holographic systems and materials, according to its website.

Apple has been rumored to looking at AR glasses some time now. Maybe I just lack imagination, but I cannot get excited about this sort of technology when I think about it in my life. There’s no doubt, AR has uses in various industries, but I don’t think anything like this would be for me.

This week on the show:

Stephen struggles with vowels and Federico dreams about buying a Mac mini while Myke ponders the future of the Apple Pencil.

My thanks to our sponsors:

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This week on Query:

Which email service is right for kids? What’s the best way to use Migration Assistant? How do you set a geofence in Reminders when your home doesn’t have an address? All this and more this week!

On today’s episode of Liftoff:

NASA is inching toward crewed flights, with its Mobile Launcher Platform coming together and cis-lunar Gateway plans coming together, all while SpaceX and Boeing races to complete its crewed hardware. Elsewhere, Spitzer celebrates 15 years in space and OSIRIS-REx has spotted its target.

Slowly but surely, NASA is preparing to fly astronauts from American soil once again.

My thanks to our sponsor this week:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code LIFTOFF at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

After downloading the firmware update, AirPort Express users have reported being able to target the AirPort Express right alongside other AirPlay 2 devices when running iOS 11.4.1 or iOS 12. With the AirPlay 2 update, 2012 AirPort Express models offer support for multi-room audio and are able to work with other AirPlay 2 devices such as the HomePod, the Apple TV, and Sonos speakers.

This is great news for people using AirPort Expresses to power home audio setups. Good on Apple for brining support for AirPlay 2 to a device that has been discontinued.