Tag: iPhone

Article

Facetime and other videoconferencing apps now feasible for Apple TV with your iPhone as a camera and microphone

You can now FaceTime from your Apple TV | ZDNET

Apple’s TVOS 17 Brings FaceTime to Apple TV, Find My Remote Functionality to Siri Remote – CNET

FaceTime is coming to Apple TV | Engadget

From the horse’s mouth

Apple

tvOS 17 brings FaceTime and video conferencing to Apple TV 4K (Press Release)

My Comments

A device class I always have wanted to see when it comes to videocalling and videoconferencing is a group videophone that connects to an ordinary large-screen TV set or monitor for its display and audio output. The idea behind this display concept for this use case is so that a group of people at one location can participate in a videocall. Example situations include a group of family members at the “family house” making a videocall to distant relatives during Christmas Day; or someone intent on buying a business, meeting with their lawyer at the lawyer’s office and talking with the vendor who is at another location.

A few companies are working on having their platform-based set-top boxes or streaming sticks serve this function by adding group videocall functionality to their set-top platform and it is something I was wanting to see Apple do with their Apple TV set-top box. This function works on Apple TV devices that run the next major version of tvOS i.e. tvOS 17.

As well, an iPhone or iPad running iOS/iPadOS 16 works as the camera and microphone for the Apple TV, thanks to Apple’s “Continuity Camera” functionality that was introduced to MacOS and now being “haked in” to tvOS. This is to be facilitated with a stand that Apple will supply as a first-party accessory so you can have the rear cameras facing you during the video call. The iOS device will link to the Apple TV via a Bluetooth link or the fact it is on the same logical small network thanks to Wi-Fi.

This functionality is to support Apple’s native FaceTime videoconferencing platform but Apple is to provide developer support for software developers who want to build or port desktop videoconferencing software to tvOS. Zoom and Webex will be the first two third-party videoconferencing platforms to have this tvOS support.

There is the ability to use the Apple TV’s Siri Remote to initiate a FaceTime call or you can transfer a FaceTime call you are engaging in to the Apple TV so that the other parties appear on the TV screen and you can hear them on your TV’s sound setup. Most likely third party applications will support a similar process.

In this setup, you will have to use the Apple TV’s Siri Remote to control the videocall such as to mute the iPhone’s camera or microphone, hand the call back to the iPhone to continue it privately or to end the call. If messages come in to the iPhone during the call, a simple notification not attributed to the message’s source will pop up so as to keep the message effectively private.

The SharePlay functionality, which allows you to share what you are currently watching from a video source hosted on your Apple TV will still operate so you can use Apple FaceTime to tantalise another person about that show.

There are still questions to answer regarding how the FaceTime facility will authenticate users who set it up to make or take calls using only the Apple TV Siri Remote, rather than using an iPhone and transferring where necessary. As well, would the ability to transfer a FaceTime call from your iPhone to the Apple TV be only limited to the Apple ID accounts that the Apple TV device is associated with? This can be an issue where the Apple TV device is bound to one Apple ID account to represent the whole household rather than each adult individual registering their Apple ID with the same Apple TV device.

At the moment, this functionality is part of a developer-only beta software package but is expected to be fully established as part of tvOS between September to November 2023.

Select Options to set up the Bedtime Mode behaviour

Apple’s iOS operating system since version 12 have support for “Bedtime” mode which allows you to have a good sleep. This is achieved through optimising the display to reduce blue light in a sleep-friendly manner along with default automatic enablement of “Do Not Disturb” mode where the iPhone won’t ring through during the hours the Bedtime mode is in operation. This will be heralded by your iPhone ringing a phrase of Brahms’ Lullaby with a music-box sound when that mode is effective.

But some of us may don’t want to miss important calls that come through at night due to work or personal reasons. An example of this could be a person who is a registered keyholder for a premises and needs to know of alarm incidents affecting that premises. Or someone you expect home may be arriving late and wants to let you know they are on their way or changed plans. In a simple case, you may not want to miss that important call from someone who is on the other side of the world.

The default implementation for Bedtime mode has your iPhone in “Do Not Disturb” mode where your iPhone won’t ring or sound a notification tone for text messages while that mode is in effect. But you may want most of the sleep-friendly benefits of this mode while being able to be woken by those important calls.

Clear the Do Not Disturb option to allow calls and texts to come through during Bedtime Mode

To enable this, you need to go to the Clock app and select the Bedtime screen. Select “Options” and turn off the “Do Not Disturb” mode on that screen to allow calls to come through. The display will still be dimmed through this time but the iPhone will ring or sound a notification tone.

You may also have to check for scheduled “Do Not Disturb” times in case you used this feature to set up a “do-not-disturb” period surrounding your normal bedtime. This is a feature that an iOS user may have implemented before updating to iOS 12. You can check this feature in the “Do Not Disturb” option in the Settings app.

If you do use the “Do Not Disturb” option, you can allow certain caller groups to break through and cause your phone to ring irrespective of when this option is in effect. One of these is “Favourites” which allows you to mark contacts as a “favourite”. Or you can use the Groups option to allow calls from contact groups that you have pre-defined. This is important if you mark out your contacts in to contact groups like “work” or “family” and is a complex procedure that requires you to use your Apple iCloud.com account on a Web browser.

The use of a predefined caller list to override “Do Not Disturb” may not work well with callers who call you using VoIP or from behind a business phone system. This is because you may find that the caller ID for their call may be different from their phone number due to them, for example, calling from the nearest extension rather than their own extension.

iOS and Android could natively follow the Symbian (original Nokia feature-phone operating system) approach where you have different situation-specific alerting presets that affect your phone’s audio / vibration / indicator-light behaviour. This can also allow the use of one or more priority call lists so that callers you select for a particular situation can ring through. Such presets can be linked to operation modes like the “Bedtime” mode or alarm clock so they can be effective during these modes.

As well, Apple could simplify the process of creating and managing caller groups on the iOS contacts list while you are using your iPhone’s user interface. This is important for processes like adding new contacts to your list or revising your contacts, and can make the process more intuitive.

Article

Doncare launches LiveFree App to fight domestic violence | The Weekly Review

From the horse’s mouth

Doncare Community Services

Press Release (PDF)

Facebook Page

App Site (iTunes App Store)

My Comments

Doncare Community Services, along with Doncaster Rotary Club, have just launched an iPhone app that provides information about domestic and relationship violence. This provides the general information that women need to know about handling these situations along with knowledge of legal and similar resources they can avail themselves of.

A typical situation that concerns online domestic-violence resources is that these resources are typically furnished as Web pages which can yield a privacy risk for the victim of this violence due to the fact that Web browsers list what you have browsed. This is a key risk for  lot of these victims who live in a highly-controlled abusive relationship. Here, the perpetrator is often likely to check on recent Web-browsing activity that the person has done on the computer equipment used in their home as part of wanting to know what they think and do as well as whom they see. These people even have to do this browsing from their workplace’s computer, a friend’s computer or a publicly-accessible computer like one installed in a library or café.

The native mobile app has the advantage that they can download the app from the platform’s app store, use it and delete it quickly if they fear that the perpetrator is snooping around their phone. Then they re-download the app from the app store as and when they can.

One limitation about this app is that it is focused on resources and legal options that are available and relevant to Victoria, Australia. An improvement that I would have would be to download information about options available in other jurisdictions, something that can be provided during the setup phase or at a later point. This effort could be positioned as part of a localisation effort that would take place during the app’s lifecycle.

At least this is an example of what can be done by family-violence support organisations regarding using the smartphone and tablets that people own. This is where a free, easily-downloaded, easily-uninstalled app that has this critical information and access to critical resources can be used as a tool by people who are at risk.

Articles

Apple to unveil iPhones with 4.7in and 5.5in screens on September 9 | The Australian

Apple sets Sept. 9 for new iPhone debut, report says | CNet

My Comments

Apple now has intentions to supply a smartphone as large as most desirable Android smartphones

Personally, I have noticed Apple iPhone users become enamoured over the larger screens offered by the recent crop of Android-based high-end phones like the Samsung Galaxy S and Note series. For example, a friend of mine liked the fact that my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 had a large screen and thought that this could be a mobile phone solution for her older mother-in-law if this was available in the iPhone range because of the iOS platform being the preferred operating environment for that family.

Apple is feeling worried that the competition are offering better devices than them and the rumour mill that floods the American tech press started to flow with talk about an upcoming iPhone to be launched this year. This has been augmented with Apple having the iOS 8 nearly ready to release at effectively “8.0.0”, which tends to lead to talk of a major revamp for at least one iOS-based product range, usually the iPhone rather than issuing one or more variants or product refreshes. As well, the press were running reports about the manufacturing plants being required to start manufacturing runs of at least 70 million units long, if not 80 million units.

At the moment, the report reckons that September 9 will be the time Apple premieres this product range with typically 2 weeks later being the time that the faithful can line up outside the Apple Stores and mobile phone resellers to get their claws on these devices. Questions I often think of are whether Apple will provide a large lineup of these devices to suit different user needs and requirements.

What I like of this news is that the large-screened phones are becoming available in all of the smartphone operating platforms rather than some of these platforms. It may also be a chance for Apple to answer the wishes of their faithful who have been pining at the larger-screen phones offered by the competition and allow these people to stay loyal to the Apple ecosystem while satisfying the large-screen desires. Could I also see this as a chance for Apple to investigate the idea of touch-screen computing for the Macintosh platform and make computers and displays that have the touchscreen interface.

Article

Apple: New ‘Metal’ Platform to Improve iOS Gaming | Mashable

My Comments

Android has come a long way ahead with mobile games performance courtesy of the NVIDIA Tegra chipsets and similar high-performance chipsets being implemented in the top-end tablets. This has also be brought up with variants of that operating system being compiled and shoehorned to exploit these chipsets leading to tablets showing up with the kind of performance expected of by hard-core gamers.

Now Apple’s not leaving itself behind with their iOS platform. They have written in to iOS 8 some code that takes advantage of their latest A7 chipsets by implementing the “Metal API”. This allows the operating system to have the games work directly with the iPhone’s or iPad’s processor to yield smooth performance rather than using OpenGL for this purpose, which could allow game developers to target the latest iPads as a games platform for the “full-on” titles. There was even a “demo” of this being shown today at the WWDC Apple-platform developers’ conference based on the Unreal Engine 4 gaming engine to prove what this was about.

There are questions that have to be raised about the “Metal” API regarding battery runtime because some of the games may ask more of the iOS device when in full flight. Similarly, games for the mobile platforms may only be seen to work well for “short-play” casual or strategy titles where continual interaction may not be seen as important.

Could this mean that all of the main mobile platforms could come up with the kind of gaming expected of console and regular-computer platforms, where there is the high level of responsiveness being expected?

The HP OfficeJet 6700 Premium – an example of a printer’s control panel that is about printing apps

Previously, only “regular” desktop and laptop computers were highly programmable with a huge hive of companies and individuals writing programs for them. These typically ranged from applications like word processors, spreadsheets, databases, graphics editors and the like through to games and entertainment software. Typically the people who used these computers either loaded the software from tapes, disks or other media or simply downloaded them from bulletin-boards, online services or the Internet initially by telephone but through networks like cable TV. Then they ran these programs on the computers to gain the benefit from them.

Now, Apple popularised the idea of downloading programs to their mobile devices using the iTunes App Store. This is although there were online services and Internet Web sites hosting programs for other mobile devices but the practice was considered very difficult. It included loading the programs from the iTunes App Store using the phone’s control surface without the need to use a regular computer to facilitate this procedure.

A smartphone based on the Android platform

Subsequently companies who manufactured mobile phones and tablet computers implemented this kind of software download and used the platform which these devices were built on as a software-development platform for third-party programmers. This led to the mobile devices i.e. the smartphones, media players and tablet computers gaining that same kind of flexibility as the regular computers.  We have ended up with remarks with “There’s an app for that” for daily tasks because of this situation.

As I mentioned before, the app stores have started to become like the bulletin boards and download services of yore where these services became full of substandard software.

Now we are seeing printers and television sets becoming developed to work on app-driven platforms. This allows these devices to perform more that what they were initially designed to do. For example, the smart-TV platforms are acquiring software front-ends for most of the catch-up TV services.

As we will head towards more devices having online and Internet functionality, we could see more of the app stores surfacing. For people who work on apps or Websites, this could become a situation where front-ends or apps would need to be ported for the different platforms. In some cases, it could end up with games and entertainment software pitched towards the dashboard of a car or towards that “Internet refrigerator” or “online microwave oven”. But on the other hand, this could lead towards increasing the role of these devices in our lifestyle. In this case, functions like device cameras could become part of health and wellness monitoring as what Fujitsu is working on.

Article

Auris turns any 30-pin music dock into a Bluetooth speaker | iPhone Atlas – CNET Reviews

From the horse’s mouth

Auris

Product Site

Where to buy

BiteMyApple.co

My Comments

There are situations where you want to play music from your smartphone or tablet to someone but they have a radio or speaker dock that has the orthodox 30-pin “iPhone” connector and no auxiliary-input jack. This makes the device very useless in that context and is more so as the Apple devices move away from the orthodox connector and more of us move away from the Apple portable-device platforms. Similarly those of us who use the “feature phones” that have mobile-phone functionality, music playback and, in some cases, navigation may want to use the speaker dock to share their music.

Now Auris have premiered a device that answers this problem. It is in the form of a battery-operated Bluetooth module that plugs in to the iPod / iPhone connector on these speaker docks or radios. This device also has a line-out connection for those speaker docks that don’t accept the audio through the 30-pin connection from anything other than an Apple device; as well as being a Bluetooth adaptor for powered speakers or equipment that has an auxiliary input of some sort. When used along with a cassette adaptor, this device can enable any old car cassette player or 80s-era “ghetto blaster” for Bluetooth audio.

As well the Auris is equipped with a microphone and functionality to turn the speaker dock or similar device in to a hands-free speakerphone for your smartphone or Skype-enabled laptop. Think of those situations where you need to have multiple people listen in to a call or you want to make or take a call in a hands-free manner.

It is one of those few Kickstarter ideas that have manifested in a real device that answers most questions and situations compared to the the situation where most such ideas end up as quick money-making ideas with useless products. Personally, I would also like to see a wholesale purchase opportunity through the Auris site so that “brick and mortar” and online retailers cam purchase quantities of this device to sell on to others. This would certainly appeal to the likes of the catalogue retailers like Sharper Image and Hammacher Schlemmer; or the mobile phone dealers and mobile networks who want to add this to their accessories line.