Posts tagged with "october 30"

October 30 Roundup: All the Little Things

Today’s Apple event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House introduced new MacBook Air, Mac mini, and iPad Pro, but there were also a lot of small details revealed outside the keynote in press releases, on product webpages, and elsewhere. Below is a roundup of some of the most interesting details you may have missed.

The Event

iPad Pros

Apple Pencil

Macs

You can also follow all of our Apple event coverage through our October 30, 2018 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated October 30, 2018 RSS feed.

Pixelmator Photo Is Coming to the iPad Later This Year

I use Pixelmator Pro almost every day on my Mac. A lot of the time, that’s for simple edits to screenshots, but I also use it for more complex layered images and editing photos. I’ve enjoyed the iOS version a lot too, but with the introduction of Pixelmator Pro on the Mac, development of the iOS version slowed. I still use the iOS app, but it’s in need of an update, which is why I was so pleased to see Pixelmator Photo teased at today’s Apple event in New York.

Pixelmator Photo will be out later this year. The app, which was first mentioned when Pixelmator Pro launched almost a year ago, is an iPad-only photo editing app that appears to closely follow the design of the Mac app and include much of its functionality too. In addition to being highlighted during Apple’s keynote today, Pixelmator Photo was on the iPads in the hands-on area after the event where Federico had a chance to try the app for a short time and was impressed.

Pixelmator Photo's image editing UI (right) is very similar to Pixelmator Pro's on the Mac (left).

Pixelmator Photo’s image editing UI (right) is very similar to Pixelmator Pro’s on the Mac (left).

According to the Pixelmator team’s preview webpage, the app:

features a collection of nondestructive, desktop-class photo editing tools, a set of stunning, machine learning-enhanced film emulation presets, a magical Repair tool to remove unwanted objects from your photos, support for editing RAW images, and more.

Pixelmator says the app will include non-destructive color adjustments including Levels, Curves, Hue & Saturation, Selective Color, and Black & White as well as Repair and Cropping tools. The app will also support RAW image editing and the ML Fix feature recently introduced in the Mac app. Machine learning will also be used to simulate analog film with a set of presets and power cropping suggestions.

Apple showed that it’s committed to offering pro-level hardware in the iPad line with the new 11 and 12.9-inch iPad Pros today. Apps are the other half of the equation, and it’s encouraging to see Pixelmator Photos announced along with Adobe’s Photoshop, and other apps that will take advantage of Apple’s new hardware.

You can also follow all of our Apple event coverage through our October 30, 2018 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated October 30, 2018 RSS feed.

The New 11” and 12.9” iPad Pros: My First Impressions and Hands-On

I just came back from the media event Apple held this morning in Brooklyn, during which the company announced major updates for the MacBook Air, Mac mini, and iPad Pro. Personally speaking, the star of the show was – unsurprisingly – the new iPad Pro line, with two new models featuring a stunning edge-to-edge display, an iPhone X-like gesture-driven interface, more powerful CPUs, and a more compact form factor.

We’re sharing more details about specs, new features, and prices in our dedicated overviews (you can find the iPad Pro, Mac mini, and MacBook Air overviews here, here, and here, respectively). In this post, I’m going to be sharing some quick first impressions about the new iPad Pros along with some notes and pictures I took at the hands-on area Apple set up after the event. Obviously, I will be sharing a lot more about the new iPad Pros over the next few days and weeks both on MacStories and AppStories.

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New Graphics Options Coming to the 15-inch MacBook Pro→

Apple quietly updated its site to announce that new GPU options are coming to the MacBook Pro. In late November, the high-end 15-inch MacBook Pros will be available with the Radeon Pro Vega GPU, the same AMD GPU graphics architecture used in the iMac Pro. The new GPU features High Bandwidth Memory, which doubles the memory bandwidth at lower power and results is faster graphics performance that Apple says is up to 60% faster than the AMD Radeon Pro 560X.

According to Apple’s MacBook Pro webpage, the Radeon Pro Vega 16 and 20, each with 4GB of HBM2 memory, will be available in late November as part of the MacBook that comes configured with a 2.66GHz 6-core CPU and 512GB of SSD storage.

You can also follow all of our Apple event coverage through our October 30, 2018 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated October 30, 2018 RSS feed.

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Apple Adds Videos to Developer Portal Featuring the New iPad Pro and Pencil→

To help developers take advantage of the latest features of the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, Apple has posted two new videos to its developer portal. Even if you aren’t a developer though, the videos include interesting insights on some of the unique features of the new iPad Pros.

The videos cover development and design issues that should be considered when adapting apps to the new iPad Pros like using safe area insets to avoid crowding content into the rounded corners or under the home indicator. Another consideration to take into account is that unlike the previous iPads, the 11” iPad Pro doesn’t have a 4:3 aspect ratio, which means apps hard-coded to those dimensions will have areas cut off at the top and bottom.

Also, apps that don’t link against the iOS 12.1 SDK will run in a compatibility mode when multi-tasking, which will add an inset at the top and bottom of the screen for both apps instead of running them fullscreen. Apple says that making sure iPad apps can handle the inset compatibility mode will also help with bringing iOS apps to the Mac in 2019.

The Apple Pencil has a set of default double-tap settings that we covered in our iPad overview, but developers have the option to customize the double tap action in their apps. Apple also encourages developers not to hide functionality behind the gesture or turn custom actions on by default.

The videos cover the iPad Pro’s new USB-C connector too. The iPad Pro supports HDR 4K up to 60Hz and external displays up to 5K as well as USB audio devices, Ethernet, and MIDI. The iPad Pro can also send simultaneous USB-C outputs, which permits uses like connecting a DSLR Camera and 5K display to the iPad Pro at the same time.

The new videos are available as part of Apple’s Tech Talk series.

You can also follow all of our Apple event coverage through our October 30, 2018 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated October 30, 2018 RSS feed.

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The New MacBook Air: The MacStories Overview

This morning Tim Cook took the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House to announce a brand new revision of the MacBook Air. This is the first significant redesign in years for Apple’s most popular line of Macs, and features huge improvements across the board.

The new machine marks the debut of a Retina display on the MacBook Air, which Cook said has been the most requested feature by far. Among other changes, the size and weight of the enclosure have also been decreased, two Thunderbolt 3 ports line one edge, screen bezels have been reduced, and new color options are available.

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The New 12.9- and 11-inch iPad Pros: The MacStories Overview

Today during its keynote event in Brooklyn, Apple took the wraps off the most radical change to iPad hardware since the first iPad Pro launched in late 2015. The new 12.9-inch and 11-inch iPad Pro models represent the iPad’s ‘iPhone X moment,’ bringing drastic changes to Apple’s tablet platform aimed at making the iPad an even more valuable tool for creation and productivity. While many of these iPad Pro changes are directly inspired by Apple’s iPhone efforts over the last 12 months, some represent new innovations entirely.

“The new iPad Pro is a huge step forward for powerful, creative, mobile computing; it has an all-new thinner design, speeds through projects with the super-fast A12X Bionic chip and unlocks with a glance using Face ID in any orientation — while you’re sitting or standing, with iPad Pro on your desk or lap, with the new Smart Keyboard Folio and new Apple Pencil,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “There has never been a mobile device anything like the new iPad Pro; it has a gorgeous edge-to-edge Liquid Retina display that curves into the corners, breakthrough performance that outperforms most laptops, Face ID, support for the new Smart Keyboard Folio and new Apple Pencil, advanced new cameras and sensors for the best AR experiences ever in any device, a high-speed USB-C connector, louder speakers, faster wireless and more, all packed into a thinner device that has all-day battery life and is 25 percent smaller in volume.”

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Mac mini: The MacStories Overview

Tim Cook introduced the new Mac mini at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House by gesturing to the sky. What followed was a video titled ‘The Arrival’ depicting a Mac mini descending like a UFO from the nighttime sky into the desert, which turned out to be a nighttime wallpaper from Mojave, Apple’s latest macOS update. It was a fun introduction to a computer that was last updated in 2014, and many Mac users had predicted would be discontinued.

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