This week’s Connected is a good one:
This week, Myke, Federico and Stephen debate what’s after the Post-PC era, the future of the iPad and Federico’s true feelings about OS X.
It was made possible by these awesome sponsors:
Álvaro Serrano:
The truth is, blood glucose measurement support in the Health app is ridiculously rudimentary as it is, even if it worked properly. A typical person with diabetes needs to monitor their blood sugar levels anywhere from 3 to 10 times a day, sometimes even more (you need to take additional tests in case of hypoglycemia, which is a fairly common event). There’s no way a significant portion of those people are going to take the extra effort to manually log each and every measurement in the Health app. I know I don’t, and if this feature has failed to encourage me — an Apple enthusiast and technologically savvy young man — to use it, its chances of convincing regular users are pretty slim.
Apple:
The Health app lets you manually enter and view blood glucose values in mg/dL (milligrams per deciliter). This unit of measurement is used by a number of countries, while some other countries use mmol/L (millimoles per liter).
HealthKit supports both units of measurement. However, if you measure your blood glucose using a device that displays mmol/L, those values can’t be manually entered or displayed in the Health app with that unit of measurement.
To prevent confusion in countries where mmol/L is commonly used, we’ll soon release a software update that will temporarily remove the ability to manually enter and view blood glucose values in the Health app while we work on an update to support both units of measurement.
As much as I want to make a Glucosegate joke, I can’t. This is just embarrassing, and for the people already relying on this feature, a serious issue. Apple needs to get on the ball with this app and get it fixed.
Casey Newton:
In the video, which features band members asking questions from fans submitted through Facebook, Bono is asked: “Can you please never release an album on iTunes that automatically downloads to people’s playlists ever again? It’s really rude.” Bono appears uncharacteristically sad while he tries to explain the band’s thinking. “Oops … I’m sorry about that,” he says. “I had this beautiful idea. Might have gotten carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that thing. A drop of megalomania, a touch of generosity, a dash of self-promotion, and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years might not be heard. There’s a lot of noise out there. I guess, we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it.”
Early Tuesday, IDG World Expo released a statement noting that the venerable Apple-oriented trade show, Macworld/iWorld would go on hiatus and not be held in 2015 as planned. The contents of that statement are:
“We are announcing today that Macworld/iWorld is going on hiatus, and will not be taking place as planned in 2015. Our MacIT event, the world’s premiere event for deploying Apple in the enterprise, will continue next year with details to be announced in the coming weeks.
Just as with the magazine, the loss of Macworld Expo is a huge blow to the community. I have very little hope that the “hiatus” will ever end. It’s weird, as Macworld Expo started in 1985. It’s been a part of the Mac community as long as there’s been one. In fact, Breen has another article looking back at the event that you should check out as well.
When Apple pulled out of Macworld in 2009, many predicted it would be the end of the show. I attended in 2012, despite making fun of the new name, and in many ways, it was the start of my “career” in this space. I made countless friends there; people I still talk to on a regular basis, but now just see at WWDC each summer.
The truth is that the community around Apple has changed as the company has grown. There are still lots of good things about it, but the small-town feel is gone. While I’m really too young to have experienced that much first-hand, I think we’re all worse off as it slips further away.
MacStories veterans Don Southard and Chris Herbert have launched an awesome new beer-tracking app. Rating, tracking and sharing what you’re drinking is all crazy easy in this app. It’s $1.99, which is way less than any fancy beer you’ll put into your library.
Anton Mityagin:
Recent news articles claiming that Dropbox was hacked aren’t true. Your stuff is safe. The usernames and passwords referenced in these articles were stolen from unrelated services, not Dropbox. Attackers then used these stolen credentials to try to log in to sites across the internet, including Dropbox. We have measures in place to detect suspicious login activity and we automatically reset passwords when it happens.
Peter Bright at Ars:
Popular online locker service Dropbox appears to have been hacked. A series of posts have been made to Pastebin purporting to contain login credentials for hundreds of Dropbox accounts, with the poster claiming that altogether 6,937,081 account credentials have been compromised.
I’d reset your Dropbox password, even if you have two-step authentication enabled on your account.
Bradley Chambers:
When the iPhone was released in 2007 with a “desktop class” web browser, it was widely praised. You could view entire websites on a mobile device. Coming from the days of WAP optimized sites on my Motorola Q, this was incredible. If we fast forward to 2014, Mobile Safari has become the app that is holding the iPad back from becoming a fully featured laptop replacement for a lot of people. While Mobile Safari is fast and loads website reasonably well, it cannot upload and download files. It can upload pictures, but that is it. Mobile Safari needs a way to upload and download any type of file into iCloud Drive (a mirrored from the Mac downloads folder).
I wonder why so many people have written off Time as a publication worth paying attention to with full headlines like this:
Why the Most Famous Astrologer in the Universe Says You Shouldn’t Buy an iPhone Right Now
This video of Steve Jobs and John Lasseter being interviewed by Charlie Rose in 1996 has floated around a bit in the last few weeks, but I finally got the chance to watch it this evening.
Knowing what we know now about how Pixar would turn out, it’s amazing to see how these guys viewed the future of their industry.