Jacob Kastrenakes | Vox

Do Not Blame Google Maps When You Tear Down the Wrong House

2019-03-06T05:38:27-05:00

I think it’s a good thing to give people second chances, and often even third and fourth chances, and to be accepting of people’s mistakes, because mistakes happen and everyone makes them and often life goes on. But if you are tearing down someone’s house, please take the time to confirm you are tearing down the correct house. And if you fail to do that — destroying someone else’s home in the process — please at least own up to the mistake instead of pinning the blame on Google Maps.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Apple Starts Providing Customer Service on Twitter

2019-03-06T05:15:28-05:00

Apple has launched a Twitter account dedicated to providing customer support. The account went live at 5 am PT this morning, and within about 20 minutes started responding to customers’ requests for help. It’s already fielding questions about Apple Music, Apple IDs and enabling smart quotes (the “curly” quotation marks, rather than the “straight” marks). It will also be tweeting out tips on how to use Apple products. By and large, it looks like a pretty standard customer service account.

Though Apple has Twitter accounts for specific products — like Beats 1, Apple Music, and iTunes — it’s largely avoided having any central presence on social media. There’s still no core Apple account, but today’s launch suggests it’s growing more comfortable with putting itself out in the open, even if that means letting everyone tweet out all the problems they’re having.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

T-Pain Shows Us How to Use the New GarageBand

2019-03-06T05:19:08-05:00

T-Pain is bent over an iPad, dancing and tapping the screen to send glimmering electronic beats through huge speakers and out into the hallway of his home. We’re down in T-Pain’s basement studio, in a room filled with giant control boards, cases of equipment and everything you’d need to put together a radio hit. But the only studio equipment T-Pain is using is his speakers — all the better to blast out the music he’s putting together in GarageBand.

T-Pain works with Apple to promote GarageBand, and I’m here at his house, just outside Atlanta, Ga., to see what he can do with the app’s latest iteration. He’s been playing around with an update to GarageBand for the past week that few other people have access to. The new iPad version adds an interface called Live Loops. It’s basically GarageBand’s take on a MIDI controller, and it should make getting started with music creation much easier.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

New Wi-Fi Standard Designed for Smart Homes and Gadgets

2019-03-06T05:12:54-05:00

It seems obvious: Wi-Fi already connects most gadgets in your home. So why wouldn’t it connect your smart home gadgets, too? But while it sounds obvious, the companies making these connected gadgets have been reluctant to use Wi-Fi. That’s because Wi-Fi requires a lot of power, and that’s a huge problem for any device that needs to be tiny, cheap, and able to run on a single charge for months or even years at a time.

So now, the group behind Wi-Fi is doing something about it. It’s announcing a new type of Wi-Fi today called Wi-Fi HaLow (pronounced “halo”) that’s meant to work on low-power devices. It’ll travel farther and even do a better job of traveling through walls. Basically, it’s an all around better option for smart home and IoT devices, at least if these claims hold up.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Tim Cook Calls Apple Tax Evasion Claims ‘Total Political Crap’

2019-03-06T05:39:26-05:00

Tim Cook doesn’t often lose his cool, but he got surprisingly riled up while discussing claims that Apple is doing its best to avoid paying taxes on overseas earnings during an interview with “60 Minutes’” Charlie Rose. “That is total political crap,” Cook says. “There’s no truth behind it. Apple pays every tax dollar we owe.”

Rose was pressing Cook on why Apple leaves billions of dollars overseas, more “probably than any other American company,” Rose notes. Cook was questioned on this matter two years ago in front of Congress, and he repeats a lot of the points that he made back then: Namely, that he thinks it costs too much to bring money back to the U.S.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

FCC Questions T-Mobile, AT&T, Comcast About Free Data Programs

2019-03-06T06:07:11-05:00

The Federal Communications Commission has sent letters to T-Mobile, AT&T and Comcast asking for information on programs that allow their customers to stream music, videos or other content without having it count toward their data cap.

The inquiry is a big deal. Net neutrality advocates argue that these programs violate the commission’s rules, giving a distinct competitive advantage to the apps and services that they let customers use data-free; upstarts, they argue, will always fail in comparison. The FCC avoided directly addressing this issue when it established its new net neutrality rules earlier this year, but today’s inquiry suggests that it shares some of these competitive concerns.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Adobe Is Telling People to Stop Using Flash

2019-03-06T06:06:16-05:00

Adobe is finally ready to say goodbye to Flash. In an announcement last night, Adobe said that it will now “encourage content creators to build with new Web standards,” such as HTML5, rather than Flash. It’s also beginning to deprecate the Flash name by renaming its animation app to Animate CC, away from Flash Professional CC.

Flash has been slowly dying over the past decade, in part due to an absence of support on smartphones and in part because it’s kind of become a scourge of the Internet. Though Flash initially had great success as a tool for creating Web games and animations, it has a number of downsides that have stood out more and more each year. Flash pages and players can be slow to load and a big drain on laptop batteries. More importantly, Flash has continually been subject to security issues, making it a major risk for anyone browsing the Web.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Luma’s Mesh-Network Router Lets You Monitor Connections

2019-03-06T06:05:15-05:00

Setting up Wi-Fi in your home has never really changed. You buy one router, hope it reaches every corner of your home, and then react in frustration when it doesn’t.

Businesses have always had a solution to this problem — putting multiple Wi-Fi access points throughout a large space — and now some startups are trying to bring that approach to the home. The latest is Luma, a new router system that’s supposed to make it easy to fill a home with strong Wi-Fi and provide a homeowner with much more control over what happens on their network.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

U.S. Government to Require Registration of Some Small Drones

2019-03-06T05:36:29-05:00

Some consumer drones will have to be registered with the Department of Transportation, the agency announced this afternoon. The department wants to create a “streamlined” registration process that will allow it to collect information on drone owners so that they can be investigated in the event of an incident. The department also intends for the registration process to inform drone owners of the regulations that they have to follow while flying, potentially reducing incidents in the first place by increasing knowledge around how consumer drones are allowed to be flown.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Adobe Is Giving Away Photoshop’s Best Features for Free

2019-03-06T05:35:37-05:00

It seems like everyone knows a person with a pirated copy of Photoshop. If you ask them why they don’t pay for it, their answer probably amounted to something like this: Photoshop costs well over $1,000, and I use 10 percent of its features.

For so long, Photoshop simply hasn’t been for those people — it’s been for the professionals who need many of its deeper, more specialized and more arcane tools. But Adobe has been making the app far more accessible lately: On the desktop, it’s started offering Photoshop and Lightroom in a bundle for $9.99 per month, and on mobile, it’s started to break Photoshop apart into easily digestible chunks offered for free. Today, that mobile strategy gets even more exciting with the release of Photoshop Fix, a photo-editing app that includes most of that 10 percent.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.