Up this week is Article TA36432:
The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh uses the same logic board and memory as the Power Macintosh 5500 and 6500 series computers. Like those computers, the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh does not have any DRAM memory soldered on the logic boards. All RAM expansion is provided by DIMMs installed in one of the two 168-pin sockets. It includes 32 MB installed in one of the two DIMM slots.
Myke and Stephen sit down together to talk through a mountain of follow-up, consider Apple’s design options on the next iPhone and revisit App Store subscriptions.
A big thanks to our sponsors this week:
2014 MU69 comes into focus, SLS has a new paint job and we talk about the two rockets used in Project Mercury and the first two crewed American spaceflights.
My thanks to our sponsors:
For the third year running, Myke and I have done a Q&A to celebrate Relay FM’s anniversary. This year, we did it on Myke’s YouTube channel:
Dave Hamilton, writing about an article in a Carnegie Mellon University newsletter:
The article details how Roger Dannenberg, Paul McAvinney, and Dean Rubine worked together to create one of the world’s first multitouch interfaces starting back in 1983. As is the case with many of our most important technologies, multitouch was initially conceived to serve a creative purpose: to facilitate generating music on a computer. A single touch interface wasn’t suitable, so this group of musically-inclined computer scientists set out to fix that… and did so by creating a multitouch interface they called The Sensor Frame.
This was a fun read to start the day.
Mark Bramhill’s “Welcome to Macintosh” is a brilliant podcast about my favorite computer platform. On August 18th, he’s back with season 3.
This season is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised $17,000 to cover travel and other costs. If you backed it, you’ll have access to behind-the-scenes content and extras.
I’m really excited about this. It’s going to be a long seven days.
On August 11, 1987, Bill Atkinson announced a new product from Apple for the Macintosh; a multimedia, easily programmed system called HyperCard. HyperCard brought into one sharp package the ability for a Macintosh to do interactive documents with calculation, sound, music and graphics. It was a popular package, and thousands of HyperCard “stacks” were created using the software.
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Hypercard, we’re bringing it back.
“Bringing it back,” indeed. The Internet Archive now has an online library of stacks you can use.1
I’m just a year older than HyperCard, and by the time I made it to the Mac, it was already long gone, but going through these archives has really opened my eyes as to how powerful and flexible this software was.
If you’ve ever plugged your phone into your car stereo, only to have the same song start playing every single time, I have some good news for you. Yesterday, a true internet hero named Samir Rezhami released a song on iTunes that’s just 10 minutes of silence — and he named it “A a a a a Very Good Song.” Since the iPhone starts playing music alphabetically when you plug it in to many car stereos, that usually means there’s one song that you hear whether you want to or not. Many songs starting with the letter A have probably been ruined thanks to this quirk — but if you download Rezhami’s creation, you’ll instead have plenty of time to queue up the songs you want to hear.
Brilliant.
Tim Hardwick at MacRumors is reporting that IKEA's Trådfri smart lighting system now support Apple's HomeKit.
The lights require a Ethernet-based gateway, not unlike the Philips Hue bridge, although Hardwick also reports that the Trådfri bulbs can work with a Hue bridge.
The bulbs run anywhere from $12 to $18 a pop, which is roughly what Philip's dimmable LED bulbs cost.
Update: Turns out, MacRumors was incorrect. IKEA says support is coming this fall.
The avalanche of news from the HomePod firmware continues as speculation about the next iPhone becomes more and more sure.
My thanks to our sponsors:
Here’s an article I hope goes away at some point in the near future:
If you connect your device to your computer with a USB cable and iTunes doesn’t recognize your iPhone, iPad, or iPod, get help.
When iTunes on your computer doesn’t recognize your connected device, you might see an unknown error or an “0xE” error. If you do, follow these steps and try to connect your device again after each step.
When Apple announced iOS 11, one feature mentioned was “Messages in iCloud,” which promised to keep your iMessages in sync and backed up to iCloud for easy restore onto a new device. It’s not a headlining feature, but one that would make life with iOS devices a little bit nicer.
Looks like the feature was pulled from today’s iOS 11 beta release:
The “Messages in iCloud” feature has been removed in iOS 11 beta 5 and will ship in a future software update to iOS 11. Users can continue to receive and store messages on each device, and they can continue to backup and restore messages using iCloud Backup.
I agree with Jason Snell that it sounds like this is coming later, as part of a later update to iOS 11. While that’s a bummer, this is important to get right, so I’m fine with it.
While we’re on the topic of iOS 11, I’ve been running the public beta on my 10.5″ iPad Pro and it’s been really nice. When today’s release ends up in the public beta channel, I may sacrifice my iPhone to it as well.