Category: visionOS

Apple launches new series of sessions 'Made for Business' in participating Apple Stores. Sessions focus on use of Apple hardware in business environments focusing on small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Kicking off during National Small Business Week in the U.S., Today at Apple will offer six “Made for Business” sessions throughout May in Chicago, Miami, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., with ongoing programming in select stores around the world throughout the year. Led by small business owners with diverse and unique stories, the sessions will highlight how Apple products and services have powered their businesses’ success.

Apple Newsroom

Apple Newsroom: Apple launches “Made for Business” in select stores around the world

Apple publishes set of optimized language models – OpenELM (for Open-source Efficient Language Model). Apple provides pretrained and instruction-tuned models with 270M, 450M, 1.1B and 3B parameters.

Our pre-training dataset contains RefinedWeb, deduplicated PILE, a subset of RedPajama, and a subset of Dolma v1.6, totaling approximately 1.8 trillion tokens. Please check license agreements and terms of these datasets before using them.

Apple

Models are available on HuggingFace.

HuggingFace: OpenELM

References and further reading:

• Apple releases new family of Open-source Efficient Language Models as AI work progresses
• Apple's four new open-source models could help make future AI more accurate
• Apple Releases Open Source AI Models That Run On-Device
• Apple's generative AI may be the only one that was trained legally & ethically

Apple Search Ads are now available in Brazil, Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and Paraguay.

Apple also posted Q&A on Apple Search Ads. Questions include topics on where ads will appear, certification, pre-launch advertising and so on.

Apple Developer:

• Apple Search Ads now available in Brazil and more Latin American markets
• Q&A: Promoting your app or game with Apple Search Ads

Apple seeds next round of beta releases – iOS/iPadOS 17.5, macOS Sonoma 14.5, watchOS 10.5, tvOS 17.5 and visionOS 1.2 get beta 3.

iOS 17.5 will allow direct web app installation in EU.

No notable changes are reported for this round of beta so far.

No new Xcode beta is available.

Release notes:

• iOS & iPadOS 17.5 Beta 3 Release Notes
• macOS Sonoma 14.5 Beta 3 Release Notes
• watchOS 10.5 Beta 3 Release Notes
• tvOS 17.5 Beta 2 Release Notes
• visionOS 1.2 Beta 3 Release Notes

WebKit team explores options on how to implement "mansory" layout using CSS. Layout might require new CSS definitions and team asks developers to provide their opinion on how it should be implemented.

WebKit Blog: Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, aka “Masonry” layout

Best Buy gives its customers an ability to see how some of the products could look at home. Catalog currently includes TVs, kitchen appliances, furniture and many other products.

App Store: Best Buy Envision

References:

• Best Buy Launches Apple Vision Pro App for Previewing Tech Products
• AR shopping gets a boost with Best Buy's Apple Vision Pro app
• Best Buy Vision Pro app lets you see TVs, furniture, and more in your home

Surgeon shared his use of Apple Vision Pro during the procedure to access video stream, patient x-ray images and notes on the surgery itself.

Video provides surgeon's experience.

YouTube: VisionPro Shoulder Arthroscopy (age restricted, might be too graphic)

Reference: Apple Vision Pro used to assist doctor during shoulder arthroscopy surgery in Brazil

It is Friday, and that means – it is time for new pack of great articles on various development topics.

• Matt Massicotte shares couple of reviews of upcoming concurrency-related changes in Swift – Concurrency in Swift 6: SE-401, Concurrency in Swift 6: SE-411 and Is Dynamic Isolation Bad?;
  
  
• Natascha Fadeeva shares her productivity tips with Xcode – My favorite Xcode keyboard shortcuts to be more productive;
  
  
• Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 6: Error Handling is continuation of articles for C++ developers willing to learn Swift by Doug Gregor;
  
  
• Antoine van der Lee guides through Swift Charts capabilities – Bar Chart creation using Swift Charts;
  
  
• Common Mistakes to Avoid When Using Enums in Swift by Leonardo Maia Pugliese is a great guide on enums in Swift;
  
  
• Donny Wals will help you try new Swift versions before they're released – How to use experimental Swift versions and features in Xcode?;
  
  
• Andrew Harrison shares his hints on adopting Composable Architecture – How to learn TCA;
  
  
• Great article from Christian Tietze – Enable SwiftUI Button Click-Through for Inactive Windows on macOS solves one interesting problem with passing events through inactive windows;
  
  
• Making your lists searchable in a SwiftUI app by Tiago Gomes Pereira guides through use of searchable modifier in SwiftUI;
  
  
• Luca Palmese covers use of server-side Swift in Using server-side Swift for machine learning processing.

And one video by Christian Tietze – SwiftUI Kata Recreating DebugInfo Viewer.

And this is it for today. Come back next week for more!

9To5Mac refers to Piper Sandler report claiming increased use of VR devices in US. 31% of teenagers had VR device in previous year compared to 33% this year.

Other reports claim that teenagers still favor iPhones and Apple Watches, while much less attracted to Apple services.

References:

• Survey shows that teenagers are using more VR devices in the US
• Teens Love iPhone and Apple Watch, But Not Apple Music and Apple TV+
• Teenagers still overwhelmingly want iPhone and Apple Watch more than any other brand

Apple notifies users in 92 countries that they could be a target of ongoing spyware attack by undisclosed organizations Apple calls 'mercenaries'.

Apple previously called similar attacks government-based.

Apple Support: About Apple threat notifications and protecting against mercenary spyware

References:

• Apple Warns Users in 92 Countries About Mercenary Spyware Attacks
• Apple alerts some iPhone users that they were targets of ‘mercenary spyware attack’
• Apple warning users about a mercenary spyware attack on iPhones